During the global pandemic, many of us thought that we should have an informal online forum, where a group of Materials Scientists from the innovation ecosystem (academia and national labs) together with the industry professionals can have an opportunity to discuss the existing challenges to translate lab-scale research to deployable technology or commercialization of products. This has led to the birth of this translational discussion forum. This forum was conceived and regularly nurtured by Bikramjit Basu, since June 2021. Currently, a team of members, including Kinshuk, Krishanu, and Debrupa co-ordinate the activities of this forum. Currently, this group has members, who are faculty members at IIT Kanpur, IIT Bombay, IIT Roorkee, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras, IIT Mandi, IISc, Bangalore as well as scientists working in strategic sectors, including BARC, Mumbai and DMRL, Hyderabad. This forum meets on a Sunday afternoon for around 3 hours, at an interval of three weeks. In each meeting of the forum, a faculty from academia or a scientist from a national lab speak on a specific research theme, followed by a talk from an industry professional from a multinational company or an MSME or a start-up, on technology/commercialization-related aspect. This allowed the members to explore the translational opportunity of the technology or product, currently under development in the innovation ecosystem. We plan to expand this forum with more interested researchers. We envision that the deliberations in this forum would expand the translational research ecosystem.
