Indiana’s Purdue University partners with India’s Infosys in public-private collaborative model for innovation

Today, in a joint effort to drive innovation, Purdue University and Infosys Ltd. announced a partnership whereby the university will train 10,000 individuals that the Indian tech giant intends to hire over the next five years. This new announcement comes just months after Infosys announced its intention to foster Indiana as one of its main US tech and innovation hubs. It also illustrates a step by the university toward accomplishing the state’s mission of attracting and retaining top IT talent. According to the arrangement, Purdue will be responsible for training the company’s American employees as part of a larger partnership, in which Infosys will establish a physical presence on the university’s campus, in addition to conducting joint research. In exchange, the company has committed to basing 2,000 of the trained employees within the state of Indiana.   The training curriculum, developed jointly between the university and Infosys, is said to cover the areas of digital agriculture, cybersecurity, biopharma analytics, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, and data analytics. The courses — with a maximum duration of about eight weeks — will mainly be geared toward the company’s new employees, but opportunities will also be available for existing employees to hone their skills via online courses. This announcement is the most recent example of a public-private partnership (PPP) between a research university and a business, though such partnerships have long existed as a way to leverage shared resources in an effort to achieve greater social and economic benefits. With that being said, as Brookings Institution suggests, significant opportunities remain for PPPs to fill the R&D funding gap across the United States. If this gap can be filled, cities such as West Lafayette (where Purdue is located) have a large advantage for attracting R&D funding and establishing themselves as an innovation hub due to the presence of a research university. In fact, a recent ranking of the Midwest’s best startup cities by M25 Group, a Midwest-based venture fund, it was noted that cities with top research universities often ranked ahead of other cities, as they were able to boost startup activity and provide greater access to resources. Moving forward, the new partnership between Purdue and Infosys will likely stand out as a model for other businesses and universities, as well as foster impressive innovation and growth within the community. Additionally, the close collaboration between the university and the tech giant will add to the state’s growing reputation as an influential player in the tech industry.