In the photo (from L to R): Oscar Reyes, Tito Aliga, MV Pangilinan, Aura Matias, Dado Banatao, Alfredo Pascual, Jun Berba, Rhod Gonzalez, Mag Albarracin, Mon Sigesmundo

Meralco and the Meralco Power Academy, together with the U.P. College of Engineering, the U.P. Alumni Engineers, Inc. (UPAE), and the U.P. Engineering Research and Development Foundation, Inc. (UPERDFI) recently hosted a CEO Forum, which was attended by more than 80 industry leaders, presidents, and CEOs.

The “CEO Forum: Lab to Market” aims to connect business leaders and other key organizations and networks involved in innovation with the U.P. Diliman College of Engineering. The forum demonstrated the breadth of research being undertaken by UPDCOE Faculty to captains of industry, engaging them in supporting research projects and key undertakings of the UPDCOE. The gathering reconnected and engaged the alumni who are existing donors, and started conversations that will drive U.P. research towards the commercialization of science and technology, and the betterment of Filipino lives.

Speaking to the guests, U.P. President Alfredo E. Pascual said in his opening remarks that “through this event, we will get your views on how to strengthen the partnerships between academe and industry.”

The program featured selected papers that were presented during the UPDCOE Professorial Chair Colloquium last year. The forum also included a keynote discussion by Diosdado P. Banatao, Founder and CEO of Tallwood Venture Capital and remarks by Meralco Chairman Manuel. V. Pangilinan.

In his speech, Pangilinan explained that “technology can help alleviate poverty. At the end of the day, our pursuit of technology and science in business is not being done for the sake of elegance. The ultimate test is measured by how well we improve the welfare and lives of our people. If we can do that, then we have done a proper job for the people.”

Meralco Power Academy, as an educational foundation of MERALCO, supports the advancement of the engineering profession by partnering with various institutions like U.P.

FUTURE OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION AND ITS CONTRIBUTION TO ECONOMIES
by Dado Banatao

To connect engineering education and its contribution to economies, we need to look into how economies grow and what causes a sustained high economic growth. Just as important, we need to also mention the other players of economic growth.

The two most important contribution of engineering education to economic growth are technologies generated from research laboratories and engineers using these technologies into the design of products.

The economic impact of technologies happens when they are used in the creation of innovative and highly differentiated high value products and services to address society’s needs. These products and services make people become more creative, productive and live comfortable lives. Companies that innovate generally are very successful and use profits to create more technologies and products.

Over time, the aggregate profit contribution of these successful companies contribute to sustained high economic growth in the country.
Some of the common indicators of sustained high economic growth are:

–    Political leadership and its ability to deploy the right infrastructure and business policies
–    Strong focus on innovation funded by private and public sources
–    Large amount of public and private investments
–    High resource mobility
–    High levels of savings, and a
–    Functioning market system

Observe that these indicators point to the three biggest and influential players in innovation. They are, the government, industry, and academe.

However, sustained high growth largely depends on the private sector’s ability to innovate, invest, and entrepreneurship responding not only to local but more importantly to global market needs. At the right prices, the global market is unlimited in size and export products tend to pull the local economy along. This is especially significant because the global market is open and highly integrated and always in need of high technology based products.

It is industry and academe’s task to lead in identifying market needs, create technologies, and innovate in highly differentiated products for both local and global markets.

Generally, there is a huge difference in technology, innovation output, GDP, and overall quality of life between developed and developing countries.
Clearly, developed countries continue to lead in research and development to generate technologies and will invest in converting these technologies into innovative and highly competitive products for the global market.

Industry contributes to the training of technology experts through design and development of products, but, it is academe, through its various laboratories and research institutes that builds the foundation of technology experts and the generation of new and unique technologies.

Therefore, academe must define and direct its research focus with industry to address market needs.

However, it is industry that takes the ultimate risk and provides investments necessary to create products based on these technologies.

To summarize these roles:
1.    Government creates the right infrastructures and business policies
2.    Academe produces manpower expertise through engineering education and research institutes creating technologies, and
3.    Industry taking the risk and provides the necessary investments to innovate and create products.

When successful, extremely high revenues and corporate value is achieved, contributing to the country’s need for sustainable high value employment and further high levels of investments by industry.

These industry profits and growth have immediate impact on employment, taxes for country infrastructure development, and, funding for fundamental research by academe to fuel more innovation and product creation by industry.

Further, overall savings by the population grow significantly and properly deployed by investment institutions, significant growth in gross domestic product (gdp) becomes an international attraction for foreign direct investments (fdi) which in turn bring in more technology and global market knowledge.

This closed loop system promotes sustainable high economic growth, which is the only known solution to eradicate poverty.

When we talk about innovation, it is important that we mean inclusive innovation. Properly planned, inclusive innovation has the potential to lessen the gap between the rich and the poor.

One of the tools we have for inclusive innovation is entrepreneurship. With proper and fair distribution of equity to investors, entrepreneurs, and employees, successful execution by start-up companies result in significant wealth for entrepreneurs, employees and investors.

This is one of those occurrences where knowledge is more valuable than money. Therefore, entrepreneurship is the fastest means of diffusing wealth to the population through knowledge and hard work.

In this context, there is no better example of entrepreneurship success than silicon valley.

Significantly, within the last ten years, entrepreneurship penetrated the agenda of government, academe, and industry in many developing countries. This happened simply due to the possibilities that innovation and entrepreneurship bring in terms of wealth creation.

Innovation and entrepreneurship become tools for economic development enabled by technologies developed from academe and industry research institutions.
The future of engineering education and its contribution to a country’s economy in the near and long term will show the following:
1.    Academe in developed countries, through universities and research institutes, continue to lead in innovation.
2.    Developing countries, willing to fund research for the purpose of producing technologies for innovation, may join the ranks of developed countries assuming their government, industry, and academe work as one unit for this purpose.
3.    In many countries, universities accelerate the process of transfering these innovations by creating “foundries” where professors and students start to create products with the help of advisers from industry.
4.    When some semblance of a product emerge, the institute exposes the product idea to industry and begin to raise funding for a start-up. If successful, the start-up relocates outside of the campus but still near the university. At this stage venture capital begins to spend time evaluating these start-ups for investment possibilities. The cycle in building companies begin when funding is successful.
5.    Professors and students become founders or advisers to the start-up.
6.    Through innovation and entrepreneurship, universities become direct contributors to economic development.
7.    Foundries differ from incubators in that the start-up get it’s initial funding from a small fund run by the university institute.
8.    In many universities, the role of design starts in the classroom as part of the curriculum and product design moves to the laboratory. This is the beginning of accelerating product innovation. To a large extent, technology development and design risk is substantially reduced. Most of these work replaces industry’s task of proving the technology in their laboratories and accelerate product development.
9.    Engineering programs begin to provide options for students to take multiple disciplines in engineering and business management still within a four year period to get their degrees. The goal is to enhance design capability, productivity, and success of the student in industry.

Summary:
1.    Returns from technology innovation based on research are immediate, meaningful, and mandatory for the country’s economic development.
2.    When successful, due to intellectual property and product value, both university and creators of technology benefit financially.
3.    For future education, programs must be put in place to enhance the ability of academe to be part of economic development.
4.    Innovating in product design is difficult and complex, utilizing various expertise. Consequently, university research must be multi-disciplinary.
5.    As a result, universities and therefore high level education, working with industry must adopt a globally focused research agenda if it wants to be relevant in product innovation and a significant contributor to the country’s economic growth.