Ganesh Shankar, Founder and MD of FluxGen Engineering Technologies shares with us details of his latest undertaking as Guest Faculty at his alma mater IISc, Bangalore. The Industrial IoT Course ( IIoT) designed by him will help participants understand various technologies, platforms and tools available to implement IIoT products along with business models associated to make it marketable and profitable.
Tell us about the IIoT course designed by you, who has signed up for the course?
The course is offered as part of a Proficiency program at Center for Continuing Education (CCE) at IISc. Participants from various occupational backgrounds, such as Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, MCA, Finance, Business Development and others have taken up this course. The course is designed as interactive sessions with my role being more of a moderator. My ultimate aim is to see a bunch of participants pursue entrepreneurship in IIoT after completing the course.
Ganesh Shankar and his class of IIoT Entrepreneurs at IISc
Why should an IIoT enthusiast join this course, what insights will he gain by signing up for the course?
The key take-away for the participant is the opportunity to create marketable IIoT products by the end of the 14-week course. We have started a hypothetical IIoT start-up called as 14WEEKS IoT Technologies Private limited from the participants of the course. The class is divided into seven teams working on seven different problem statements. The teams are divided such that each team has people with varied interest such as embedded systems, mobile app development, business development, cloud computing, electronics circuits etc. We have had domain experts and Industry leaders visit every week to share their thoughts with the class. So far we have had the director of Mediatek – Shivoo Koteshwar, CEO of NASSCOM CoE-IoT- Sanjeev Malhotra, VP of IESA – Venkatesh Kumaran and other prominent personalities as guest speakers, who with their experience have kindled the minds of the class. We have had visits to manufacturing facilities, rapid prototyping facilities and also design houses too. The participants have visited my own start-up FluxGen many times and are closely working with some of my colleagues to implement their product prototypes.
The end goal of 14WEEKS IoT Tech is to become a real company and raise funds from the investors. Based on the performance and involvement of the participants, I’ll be happy to share the equity of the startup.
What is your classroom teaching approach? What is the methodology that you use?
The methodology of the course that I’m offering at IISc is a result of my idea of a class room that has evolved over a period of time. I strongly believe that the teacher should only setup an environment for learning and make himself or herself progressively redundant with time. During my time at the institute as a student (2006 -2008) I used to have very intense discussions with my friends on philosophy, which did include ideas of Jiddu Krishnamurthy, Socrates, Plato, Buddha, Ayn Rand, Geeta etc and now I see this class room as a perfect platform to experiment with those ideas that originated from the very same campus.
The team at FluxGen Office
Can you share some details of the prototypes your students are creating as part of the course?
The product prototype the class is working on includes: Street light monitoring system with smart controls, Printing press monitoring system, IoT-based monitoring of a Power distribution system for Continuous Process Machines, Smart Industrial Junction box, LT and HT transformer remote monitoring system, Low current transformer quality monitoring in a manufacturing facility and Smart Solar Panel.
What prompted you to start this course?
It’s been eleven years since I graduated and five years since I started FluxGen. In these years I found my true calling in inspiring and igniting people’s mind to convert an idea into reality. I must say I’ve met some amazing minds in the process, who have inspired me to do things that I would have never imagined to do. This course is one such humble pursuit. I hope we create products that will change the way the Industry works and mankind lives.
Ganesh Shankar writes about the course on a weekly basis in the below site:
https://medium.com/@isiganesh
