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Due to academia's lack of involvement in research, development, and innovation activities, there is a tremendous amount of talent underutilised in Indian engineering educational institutions. Indian engineering educational institutions confront numerous obstacles that limit their participation in research. Lack of funding, a tight budget, poor fund allocation, a weak research ecosystem, fewer opportunities for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research, a decline in PhD enrolment, over-centralization, a lack of accountability, transparency, and bureaucratic structures have all contributed to an increase in the administrative workload at universities, which has diluted their primary emphasis on research. The K J Somaiya Institute of Engineering and Information Technology (KJSIEIT), an engineering educational institute in India, is the subject of a research case study in this paper that addresses the challenges of Indian engineering institutes' limited involvement in research development and innovation. KJSIEIT's efforts to establish a research culture have demonstrated this by launching practises for research, development, and innovation such as strong hand holding for idea implementation, building incubator and start-up support systems, constant encouragement for increased research involvement, hands-on training for start-ups, applying for and competing for government funding, working on industry collaborative, societal, need-based, educational, agricultural and healthcare. These tested procedures at KJSIEIT can serve as a model for other engineering schools in India in addressing the issues of low participation and contribution in research and supporting ecological development of developing nations in order to survive in the cutthroat environment of contemporary economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel extension of a very recently developed multicriteria decision making (MCDM) algorithm known as the preference ranking on the basis of ideal-average distance (PROBID) method in a picture fuzzy (PF) environment. We use the full consistency method (FUCOM) with picture fuzzy numbers (PFNs) for deriving the criteria weights. We attempt to apply our proposed model for addressing a real-life complex decision making problem in social science research that gets influenced by the dynamics of discrete human behaviors. We compare eight popular video conferencing (VC) tools used for teaching-learning and meeting purposes in India using our novel integrated multicriteria decision making (MCDM) framework of FUCOM-PROBID with PF information. The criteria have been derived using the theoretical foundation of usability and user experience (UX). Based on the opinion of the decision makers (DM) or users who took part in the study, we find that ease of operations, compatibility with multiple systems and devices, quality of the voice, and video transmission and features are given more emphasis while Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet are found to be preferable options to the users. The result of the proposed model shows stability and robustness as evident from the validation test and sensitivity analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]