EETimes India - September 1-15, 2008 - (Page 12)

Community SME, educational programmes show how NI cares Did you know that small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) form the backbone of the Indian economy? Ninety-five per cent of the industrial units, 40 per cent of the manufacturing sector output and 36 per cent of exports from India are due to the SMEs. From about 80,000 units in the 1940s, SMEs have grown to over 32 lakh registered units providing employment to 1.8 crore. Did you know that India annually graduates four lakh engineers (all fields), of which only a fraction are considered employable? While the actual size of that fraction depends on who you are talking to, it is generally agreed [within the industry] that current engineering education is not meeting the industry’s needs. National Instruments Corp.’s VP of sales in Asia, Victor Mieres, was in India recently when he talked to Vivek Nanda about his company’s corporate social responsibility programme. How does National Instruments define corporate social responsibility? We have over time formalised the work done in the past by National Instruments’ employees to “give back.” For instance, when I joined National Instruments 20 years ago, we had a sharing programme where someone donated $1 to a cause that was important and we [NI] donated $1 as well. But we’ve become bigger and we’ve become global and things have changed. In Austin, we have a formal programme called NI Gives where we pull together to give in a more organised fashion. There’s a tremendous amount of marketing that happens to get people excited. Something similar came from National Instruments India employees—NI Cares. We’ve decided to work together to help orphanages and sponsor schools. We donate a portion of the revenue from each person who undertakes the NI training programme to support a child’s education for a year; support 130 orphans for primary education; and have adopted a village and are sponsoring the education of 70 children. the SMEs that are trying to do something for which they may not have access to the needed technology because they cannot afford it. The vision of Planet NI is to nurture innovation by providing access to technology, especially our software LabVIEW, which is our flagship product. How is your SME programme different from a discounting scheme that helps develop a new market? It is quite all right to be cynical, I think… there’s no doubt that it is difficult to say that what we are doing is not going after another market because in the end we are a corporation. We have a responsibility toward the shareholders. We think what we are trying to do with Planet NI is somehow take it out of our day-to-day work and figure out a way to contribute to the community by doing what we do best as engineers and scientists. So the first thing we want to do is engage our employees. We know they are passionate about helping. And ally want to do: to help engineers who in turn will help the people, but outside the framework of the day-to-day basis. Planet NI gives them [employees] permission to help those SMEs that need help—through leasing, loaning or even giving it away. Or, they may need training and we can provide it outside of the framework of normal training we provide organisations. We have very talented engineers who are very passionate to help. Perhaps if we can get everyone excited even some of our partners’ and customers’ employees could help small companies get started with technologies. NI earlier mentioned that employees are empowered to make products affordable to the SMEs—that all employees participate. To what extent do they participate in taking such decisions? The way we envision the approach in the beginning would be that people would come in through a number of channels, such as employee recommendations, media reports, etc. They probably would say, “Hey, we read in EE Times-India that you are donating LabVIEW.” We will ask them who they are, what they want to use the software for. Because this is new, we’ll pass it on to Jayaram [Pillai], the managing director of India. We want him to be the gatekeeper. We’ll be learning as we go through this journey to see what kind of people call. We’ll do a bit of due diligence to make sure people are who they say they are. And I imagine that we’ll err on the side of being generous to see how this grows—the seed we have planted will hopefully become a tree. We are toying with the idea of coming up with a non-profit organisation. That will allow more people to get involved… perhaps allow our partners to get continued on page Mieres: Anybody who can benefit from our tools in improving the lot of human beings, especially here in India, should have access to our technology. So it is something that’s driven by the employees with support from the corporate level. Specifically for India, I look at it this way: Our technology is pretty advanced. We have made tremendous in-roads into multinationals and large corporations and the government. But how can we help scientists and engineers who are perhaps trying to solve the problems at a local level. Perhaps they want to set up a small enterprise to come up with a technology to provide clean water. We came up with Planet NI, a framework… a well-defined programme to help save the environment. This is not just in India but at a global level. Historically as you know, we’ve been working very aggressively with universities with the aim to teach the future engineers tools and give them the experience that will make them better engineers. That’s something we have been doing in the past for over the 11 years we’ve been in India. One thing we have not done in India as aggressively is helping Discuss Corporate hand in education: boon or bane? Companies infuse much needed infrastructure and know-how into cash-strapped institutions. But with vendors aiming to produce graduates loyal to their products, does charitable work run the risk of tying engineering development to the limitations of sponsored products? maybe they found that the best way of helping is to help directly—an orphanage by collecting funds or a child by working with a rural school. As National Instruments, we can provide more than just some time off to do this work. And we have a product that we sell to multinational corporations. So we came up with the idea of a non-profit organisation called Planet NI to reinforce the point that this is something that we re- 12 EE Times-India | September 1-15 2008 | www.eetindia.com http://www.eetindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/industry-news/SME.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_080901 http://www.eetindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/industry-news/corporate social responsibility.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_080901 http://forum.eetindia.co.in/FORUM_POST_1000039250_1200087028_0.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_080901 http://www.eetindia.com/STATIC/REDIRECT/Newsletter_080901_EETI02.htm?ClickFromNewsletter_080901

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EETimes India - September 1-15, 2008

EETimes India - September 1-15, 2008 Contents National Semiconductor Get the Low Down on IEEE 1588 Clock Synchronisation Tech Insights DigiKey Combine Techniques to Reduce ICT Cost, Complexity Microchip Technology National Instruments SME, Educational Programmers Show How NI�Cares Texas Instruments

EETimes India - September 1-15, 2008

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