How Flipkart is collaborating with academia to solve problems for Bharat

Flipkart is deepening ties in social commerce, machine translation, search and natural language processing with top institutes in the country as it aims to tap next 200 million users.

In an effort to tap the next 200 million users or Bharat consumers, Flipkart is deepening its collaborations in the area of social commerce, machine translation, search and natural language processing with some of the top institutes in the country. This includes solving some of the most critical industry problems with the help of professors and students. Social commerce is the use of social network communities to drive e-commerce sales. Social commerce is expected to be about a $70 billion market opportunity in the next few years.

Flipkart said it aims to establish deep academia collaborations which could help students and the institution to leverage its data and platform knowledge to work on India specific e-commerce challenges, in addition to publishing research papers. 

The firm offers grants and market insights to institutions to develop hands-on prototypes and publish research papers in collaboration with the teams at Flipkart. This provides academia with an opportunity to work closely with Flipkart in solving relevant technical challenges in the e-commerce domain.

Recently, Flipkart signed an MoU (memorandum of understanding) with the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), the industry interface organisation of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-D).

“Flipkart will be working with IIT Delhi in developing research papers and future capabilities to complement the growth of social commerce and bring a seamless experience to users,” said Mayur Datar, chief data scientist at Flipkart. “In recent years, social commerce has garnered a lot of interest though it has been at play informally for several years now and with the scope of e-commerce expanding, it has attained a more formalised shape. The social commerce space in India is also expected to witness similar trajectories just like some of the developing countries, however, the actual growth trend is difficult to chart out at the moment.”

Datar said there are essentially two types of social commerce. One is called reseller commerce or influencer commerce which is largely at play in the lifestyle space, or fashion and consumer electronics space. The other type of social commerce is Group Buying wherein the reseller aggregates demand to make an order to attain cost efficiencies.

However, there are several problems statements related to social commerce that needs to be solved. “How do you recommend the right kind of products for these resellers, bringing in notions of fairness, allowing them to maximise their commissions while keeping the end customer interests in mind right, making sure that they get the right products that they care for, that they are interested in,” said Datar. “So, there are some problems like these very technical problems in the space of recommendations, fairness, and so on, related to social commerce, where we would like to engage with IIT Delhi, and professors from IIT Delhi, to solve them together.”

Anil Wali, managing director, Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer said FITT was established almost 30 years ago to engage with industry to develop and commercialize as much of the intellectual property that gets created at IIT Delhi. 

“Commercialisation here essentially means whenever we engage or interact with industry and work on their problems statements, there is a lot of knowledge sharing where we also get to learn from the industry,” said Wali. “Whether it is in terms of data, user interfaces and user behaviour, depending upon the industry we are interacting with. And that actually helps us refine our methods, our understanding of the problem.”

Over the past few years, Flipkart has partnered with 10 academic institutions to undertake research in the areas of machine translation, social commerce, search and natural language processing. Here nearly 60 students and professors were involved, resulting in 33 research papers published in reputed journals. These institutions include IIT Patna, IIT Delhi, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Kanpur, IIM Kolkata, IIM Ahmedabad and IIIT Hyderabad to name a few.

Collaborative research projects have led to the development of a range of technologies such as fashion recommendation, query understanding, attribute extraction and demand planning. The other such technologies include product categorization, review helpfulness, supply chain management (e.g. warehouse storage allocation), fraud detection, and machine translation. Several research papers have also been published as a result in top academic conferences of ML and AI applications such as information retrieval (IR), knowledge discovery, data mining and natural language processing (NLP).

Flipkart said it is committed to building a “Culture of Innovation” both within and outside of the organisation to achieve this vision. With initiatives such as Project 1K and Patents Program, the firm said it aims to encourage employees to become problem solvers and drive the organisation’s Innovation quotient. In this endeavour, the firm said it becomes essential to work with ecosystem partners to build the next generation of problem solvers and Flipkart is looking at driving constructive research that translates into new projects which will help achieve ecosystem benefits, leading to economic growth. 

Flipkart said building critical solutions with the help of industry applied research, harnessing young talent will help solve ecosystem challenges and make e-commerce more inclusive to cater to consumers across the country including the tier 2 and 3 markets. It said collaborations between academia and industry provide a robust model of operation by empowering the economy, enabling innovation, growth in the education system and producing an employment-ready workforce.