The Middle Ground | Episode 1 - What's Worth Translating (ft. Dr. Ashish Lele, Director, CSIR-NCL)

​About The Middle Ground
India’s labs produce strong research, but turning it into products, licensable technologies, or companies takes funders, institutions, industry, and policy working together. The Middle Ground is a monthly webinar series by Nasscom Deeptech where one practitioner takes on one stage of that journey every month. Every session ends the same way: the guest names one thing they would ask the other sides to do to meet them in the middle and move the needle forward.

​Episode 1: What’s worth translating?
Every lab-to-market story starts with a decision: this result is worth taking forward, and that one is not. Who makes that call, on what basis, and what gets lost along the way? This session looks at how that decision is made in practice, from the lab’s side and the industry’s.

​Guest: Dr. Ashish Lele, Director, CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory. A chemical engineer with a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware, Dr. Lele has worked on both sides of the industry-academia gap. As a former Senior VP at Reliance Industries, he has led industry-sponsored research, product development, and a fuel cell consortium across CSIR labs and Indian industry.