As part of the memorandum of understanding, Flipkart will offer research grants and market insights to FITT to develop hands-on prototypes and publish research papers in collaboration with the teams at the e-commerce firm in the areas of social commerce, product recommendation to resellers and the consumer product exploration journey, a statement said.
This will provide IIT academia involved in the partnership an opportunity to work closely with Flipkart on research projects aimed at solving relevant technical challenges in the e-commerce domain, it added.
Flipkart and FITT will also jointly undertake a number of other initiatives, including organising seminars, offering conference travel grants and internship and mentorship opportunities, the statement said.
These collaborations aim to create industry-focused applied research on some of the most compelling problem statements of online commerce that can make e-commerce accessible to more consumers and sellers alike, it added.
According to a report by Recogn in November 2021, India is likely to have 228 million native consumers through social commerce by the end of 2022, a 45 per cent rise from the 2021 user base.
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“As an organisation committed to solving for India, we have developed numerous industry-first capabilities over the years and continue to push the boundaries to bring customer delight and create shared value for the ecosystem partners.
“In this endeavour, we are pleased to partner with IIT Delhi to co-develop capabilities that play a pivotal role in revolutionising the future of social commerce,” Flipkart Chief Data Scientist Mayur Datar said.
Datar added that this will also provide an opportunity to the students, scholars and professors to gain real-world expertise and build innovative solutions that lead to ecosystem development.
“FITT engages with industry to strengthen research translation and knowledge transfer for socio-economic empowerment. In this context, we are pleased to partner with Flipkart, a homegrown e-commerce marketplace, to explore open innovation opportunities towards creating valuable business solutions for millions of customers,” Anil Wali, MD at FITT, said.
Flipkart has previously inked several academic partnerships with several institutes, including the Indian Institute of Science (IISC), IIIT Hyderabad, IITs (Kharagpur, Patna, Bombay and Kanpur) and IIMs (Ahmedabad and Kolkata).
Flipkart also works with a few foreign universities, such as Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, San Diego.
Collaborative research projects have led to the development of a range of technologies, such as fashion recommendation, query understanding, attribute extraction, demand planning, product categorisation, review helpfulness, supply chain management (warehouse storage allocation), fraud detection, and machine translation, the statement said.
