Global Science and Technology Forum eyes "think tank" status

Anton Ravindran, who won a number of accolades including the Top ASME Entreprenuer award for 2 consecutive years (respectively in 2005 and 2006) and the winner of Singapore Indian Entreprenuer award in 2006, saw the Company he founded (Genovate) facing challenges for the first time (in more than 10 years) during the global financial crisis. After having found new investors for Genovate, he embarked on a new journey to spearhead Rapidstart (formerly a subsidiary of Genovate), as well as a new venture in Global Science and Technology Forum (GSTF) which he says he pursues from his passion and professional interests.

GSTF is dedicated to promoting research and development and offers an inter-disciplinary intellectual platform for top notch scientists, researchers, academics and industry professionals in Asia Pacific to actively consult, network and collaborate with their counterparts across the globe. The result is to facilitate an environment for continuous innovation, publication and technopreneurship.

Anton sees GSTF becoming a “think tank” for IT and Allied fields. The various programme and technical committees of GSTF constitute distinguished scholars and industry leaders/professionals around the globe who have an established track record in their respective areas of research and professional specialisation.

To achieve its mission, GSTF holds year-round initiatives including annual conferences in partnership with leading academic institutions/universities around the globe as well as workshops in partnership with industry leaders and research centres. Thereafter the academic conference proceedings is published.

GSTF will be launching its digital library by May 2010, and plans are underway to publish its own research journals as well as industry newsletters before the third quarter of this year. GSTF’s continuing mission is to be a premiere Centre of Excellence offering an inter-disciplinary platform for research, innovation, publication and collaboration at a regional and international level and to recognise outstanding scholarly and professional contributions of individuals and organisations through its conferences, workshops, publications, digital library as well as consulting.

Anton thinks that the business environment is most conducive given the government’s recent announcements to focus on innovation, research and development to increase productivity. This will require more private sector companies to also play a role in providing a Singapore-based platform for researchers and scientists around the globe to collaborate, to diffuse and to transfer the latest developments in technology.

He foresees GSTF eventually becoming a centre of excellence through these activities in leading edge technologies. On April 6th and 7th GSTF will be hosting delegates from nearly 20 countries and researchers from 50 Universities including Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, Imperial College London, Texas A & M, NUS and NTU, amongst others, presenting their research findings as part of CGAT 2010, an annual Computer Gaming and Animation international conference which he initiated 3 years ago. The conference has now become an annual international event held in Singapore.

GSTF has also so far lined up nearly a dozen such research-based conferences in some of the pioneering technologies in IT such as Cloud Computing and virtualisation, Green IT, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, amongst others. He predicts for GSTF to publish at least a thousand research articles in its first year of operation and to conduct at least half a dozen workshops in leading IT areas such as Cloud Computing Virtualisation.

The huge repository of academic research findings will be useful for the industry to apply through its workshops and for enterprises to leverage from this repository of information on innovative technologies to improve innovativeness and hence productivity. He sees GSTF being at the apex of technology transfer in the region by being a premier player in facilitating scholarly debate through its conferences, in transferring knowhow through its workshops and technology journals which will focus on the latest developments in technology and science, being a repository of information through its digital library and as a consultant in advising companies as to what technologies to adopt in order to increase productivity.

He says in the knowledge economy where innovation is the order of the day, we need to be unconventional in our business models, and GSTF he says has no real predecessor in the region as mostly such centres for excellence are public sector-driven.

He has roped in The Hon Prof Stephen Martin who was deputy vice chancellor for 2 Australian Universities and a former speaker of parliament, as well as a few other industry veterans to lend support for these initiatives.

In less than a year GSTF has created enough traction which he strongly feels is sustainable and scalable in order to achieve its vision to become a private sector-led premiere centre of excellence in 4-5 years in this region, barring another global financial crisis.