Track 01 Seeking lead
AI Reasoning with Game Theory
Rigorous foundations for how multiple agents decide, cooperate and compete.
8–12 contributors
Focused Research Organization · India
Scientific advancements to market.
What we do
IIDA turns deeptech and applied AI research into IP, products and exports — working on problems that are commercially real in three to five years, aimed at India’s SMEs and the export market.
United States
Commercialises long-horizon research through strong academia, industry and capital linkages.
China
Couples research to industrial policy and manufacturing scale.
India
Comparable talent. Fewer mechanisms to convert research into IP, products and exports. That gap is what IIDA is built to close.
Public scoreboard · live
As of 29 July 2026
0 / 3
Papers published Year 1 target: 3 original papers
0 / 2
Open artefacts shipped 1 benchmark + 1 design pattern library
0
Active contributors Across four working groups
0 / 3
Institutional partners MoUs signed with universities
These are zeros, and they are dated. We publish the count before there is anything to count, because an organisation that only starts reporting once the numbers flatter it is not reporting. Full scoreboard, including discontinued tracks →
The gap
Why this is unowned
Nobody’s incentives point at the middle.
Deeptech pays well — category leadership, premium outcomes, real productivity gains, compounding advantage. But given the depth of the economy and per-capita income, venture capital and startups pick the low-hanging fruit over long-gestation work. Academia picks what favours publication and placement. Industry favours quick payback.
What is left in the middle is a set of high-impact problems that can be built in India, exported to the world, and deployed domestically to companies willing to move first. That white space is the whole brief.
Academic incentives disfavour large-scale teamwork across disciplines and projects with a low chance of publishable results, while the commercial profit motive precludes producing public goods. Projects between the two often go untouched.
— the case for Focused Research Organizations, US and UK
Owns, doesn’t aggregate
Not a matchmaking platform. IIDA owns the IP and the equipment, and creates the assets its research needs.
Self-funding by design
After initial capital, the target is at least 30% of revenue from industry contracts by Year 2 — Fraunhofer’s discipline, not a grant habit.
Built for SMEs and export
A deliberate market segment. Research that scales commercially in three to five years, aligned to IT services and product exports.
Year one · four tracks
Research
Four questions, then one.
Every track carries written kill criteria from day one, and every track is currently seeking a lead. By the fourth quarter we commit to one focused mission and close the rest.
Track 02 Seeking lead
World Models and JEPA
Predictive architectures that learn structure from far less data.
6–10 contributors
Track 03 Seeking lead
UX and UI in Agentic Applications
The interaction layer is the adoption bottleneck, and nobody owns it.
6–10 contributors
Track 04 Seeking lead
Tokenomics — Valuing AI Token Usage
The unit economics of inference, which almost nobody can currently model.
6–10 contributors
The plan
Three years
Four exciting tracks and eager volunteers is how scope creep happens.
So the narrowing is scheduled, not hoped for. Year one explores. The Q4 gate closes three of four. Years two and three put everything behind what survived.
Honest accounting
Risk
What could go wrong, and what we did about it.
Eight things that could sink this. We wrote them down before we started so that nobody has to discover them on our behalf later.
| The risk | Why it’s real | The move against it |
|---|---|---|
| Credibility cold start | No track record yet. Funders and researchers both wait for first movers. | Anchor advisor first, entity second. Ship one visible artefact within 90 days. |
| Scientific leadership | Finding a Director with research credibility, operating ability and a volunteer ethos. | Recruit the Scientific Director in the open. The role is posted, not filled. |
| Volunteer reliability | Sustained quality from unpaid contributors requires real structure, not goodwill. | Tiered onboarding — start with 20 chosen contributors, not 200. Two-strike norm on missed deliverables. |
| Quality control | Distributed research drifts to mediocrity without rigorous review. | Low-originality work exits to a blog or whitepaper rather than being carried as research. |
| Funding before proof | Indian funders want output first. Output needs funding. Chicken and egg. | Compute-first fundraising — easier to win, and it demonstrates resourcefulness. |
| Compute access | Frontier work needs GPUs that volunteers cannot personally provide. | Compute credits as a patron contribution class, equal in standing to capital. |
| Focus discipline | Four exciting tracks plus eager volunteers makes scope creep the default outcome. | Kill criteria written before work starts. One focused mission committed by Q4 of Year 1. |
| Retention against industry | Top contributors get poached. We cannot win on salary alone. | Authorship by CRediT taxonomy, public contribution tracker, and a real path from volunteer to paid core. |
Precedent
1988
India has built an industry this way before.
NASSCOM was founded in 1988 by thirty-eight companies as a not-for-profit industry body. It anchored the 1991 software-export framework, catalysed the STPI and SEZ model, and watched the industry it convened grow from roughly $100 million to more than $250 billion.
An industry alliance — not a government department — built India’s IT sector.
Get involved
Contribute
Three ways in.
The founding group will settle at fifteen to thirty people. The ask is one to two hours a week for six months, and the willingness to act without waiting for a mandate.
Low lift
Open doors
- Warm introductions to funders and Scientific Director candidates
- Names for the Advisory Council
- Compute credits through personal contacts
- Pro-bono legal, accounting or office space
- Critique of this charter before it hardens
Medium lift
Get hands dirty
- 2–3 hrs a week as a pod lead or anchor
- Co-author or co-review the first papers
- Mentor two or three juniors a quarter
- Help write the first grant applications
- Domain advisor for one track
Higher lift
Go all in
- A twelve-month Research Lead role
- The Program Manager role
- Fundraising, or a founding patron commitment
- An industry sabbatical or secondment
- Co-apply for institutional grants