Catering R&D and Technical Needs of Indian MSMEs- TIFAC Model & Experiences

Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) are considered as the growth engine of any country.Besides contributing significantly to the economic prosperity they are the main employmentgenerators at comparatively lower capital costs. The MSME sector compliments large industries asancilliaries and contributes enormously to the socio – economic development. In India, around 4.6crore of MSMEs produces more than 6,000 products contributing around 45% to industrial output,40% to direct manufacturing exports, with a share of around 8% of the country’s Gross DomesticProduct (GDP) [1]. However, due to lack of requisite resources, most of the MSMEs over a period oftime have become technologically deficient and hence unable to address the domestic and globalmarket demands. To bridge this critical gap for putting in place a system for providing Research andDevelopment (R&D) and technical support to MSMEs towards making them globally competitive,Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC) developed a technologysupport model by leveraging the infrastructure, knowledgebase and technical human resource of theproximate academic and R&D Institutes towards providing state of the art technology and skill basedsupport to the MSMEs. Model has been further evolved to augment the innovation support to theMSMEs by linking engineering students with the MSMEs. The model has been experimented in 6different sectors of importance covering around 21 MSME clusters so far. Experiments have indicatedthat near term continued action oriented technology and skill development support to the MSMEshave the potential to make the MSMEs competitive. However, such models need to be synergized anddove tailed with other complementary support models, programs and schemes of other stakeholderOrganization and Ministries to comprehensively address the various issues hindering the growth ofMSMEs.

Keywords:

MSMEs , R&D , proximate , knowledgebase , innovation