ISLAMABAD, March 9: The Higher Education Commission (HEC) will set up technology incubators at or near the selected public sector universities. It is hoped that the proposed technology incubators will add a new dimension to research being conducted at universities and degree-awarding institutions by commercializing the results of such endeavours, an official statement said.

It will also be a training ground for entrepreneurship for technology graduates and form a crucial link between research and development (R&D) activities of universities and the industry.

The programme is unique in many respects, but in a larger perspective, it converges well with other HEC programmes focus on developing educated, knowledge-based and technologically-oriented human resource, the press release said.

A successful technology incubator with gestation period of about three years from conception to first profit-making stage, will be a paradigm shift in the philosophy of education at teaching and R&D organization.

According to another official statement, the commission is also planning to develop a scheme for enhancing global projection of Pakistan's intellectual and scientific research and publications.

The main objective of the scheme is to understand as to how the libraries of public sector universities can be automated to enhance the academic potential of the institutions of higher learning.

It may be mentioned here that access to information is a vital prerequisite for any type of research. Libraries as most basic repositories of information can be considered catalyst for human advancement.

No university can truly reach its potential without having well-equipped libraries that can support all the research requirements of its students. With the advancement of information technology over the past couple of decades, it has now become possible for libraries world wide to share and access each others collections over the World Wide Web.