Author Profile: Syed Aseem Ul Islam is PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, specializing in adaptive and model-predictive flight control systems. He received his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Institute of Space Technology, Islamabad, and his master’s degree in flight dynamics and control from the University of Michigan.
Organizations are defined by their culture and values, and research organizations are certainly no exception. Research and development (R&D) is intricately related to the people doing it. Unlike industrial manufacturing, where the main assets are the machines making the product, in R&D, the researcher is the main asset and therefore, the organization must carefully manage them.
Unfortunately, the entities under Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division (SPD) provide many examples of what not to do in R&D organizations. Therefore, a quick study of the practices of the SPD’s organizations is extremely helpful in charting a future path for Pakistan Aeronautical Complex’s (PAC) Aviation Research, Indigenization & Development (AvRID) directorate.
For PAC to succeed with AvRID, it will need to avoid replicating SPD’s institutional practices.
Firstly, since SPD organizations work under a thick veil of secrecy, any R&D they do is extremely limited in application and not shared, even across other SPD organizations.
This is obviously a very wasteful use of resources for R&D where duplication of effort is the norm. This compartmentalization may be effective for secrecy, but iti s terrible for promoting rapid and efficient R&D.
Researchers need to be able communicate with other researchers in their domain. They need to be able to publish some part of their work and integrate with the international scientific community so as to keep up with the latest technologies and processes.
It is foolish to assume a small group of isolated engineers working in secrecy will develop everything on their own. This is not a ground-breaking idea since research scientists in secretive government labs all over the world regularly publish work and collaborate and are well-known internationally.
Offices at AvRID should, therefore, be allowed to and encourage collaboration with university researchers in Pakistan and overseas. They should be encouraged to publish parts of their research in internationally reputed journals, which will bring the added benefit of building individual and national pride.
Another bottleneck to good R&D in SPD organizations is the incentive structure. The government officers employed by these organizations are on almost guaranteed and stable career paths with regular promotions based on time served and thus, there is little or no incentive to “rock the boat” or think freely.
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