India will not meet its growth ambitions on public grants alone. The countries that turned science into industry did one thing well: they matched firm outlays to campus strengths and kept that link steady for years. The policy question is clear. How do we move private research outlays from episodic Corporate Social Responsibility to a predictable pipeline that buys lab time, funds doctoral cohorts, and books pilot lines?

Leading tech firms run innovation budgets at industrial scale. In 2024, Meta’s research outlay reached about $44 billion, near a third of revenue. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, IBM, and Microsoft also reported multibillion-dollar programmes. In the U.S., enterprises booked roughly $692 billion of domestic research against about $14 trillion in net sales in 2022, a ratio near 5%. Policy instruments translate that investment into campus partnerships. The National Science Foundation’s Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers pool company fees for pre-competitive university work. The Semiconductor Research Corporation funds multi-university consortia that train talent while tackling industry-relevant problems.

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