Invention factory: New India dawning

Invention versus innovation

Here I was on a Friday morning a few weeks ago, sitting with six other judges, in a cosy Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay conference room, waiting for the event to start. The hall was filled with an audience of IIT students and some professors. I was mentally prepared for this: I am often invited by many IITs and IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management) to be in a similar role: Be part of a panel of judges where IIT or IIM students present their research papers or entrepreneurial ideas. I was mentally and emotionally prepared for a few hours of listening to and debating about the wonderful new algorithms that would be presented.

I was told that the day’s event was where 10 teams, each consisting of two members, would present a prototype of the products that they have created during their six weeks’ stay at IIT Bombay. The organisers emphasised that the focus of all the participants would be “invention”, not “innovation”. While they were holding forth on this aspect, I quietly checked on my mobile with my pal, ChatGPT, the difference between the two, and added that I needed a one-sentence answer. My pal instantly obliged: “invention is the process of coming up with something new, while innovation is about taking existing ideas and improving or transforming them for better use.” That made things clearer for me.
 

Once the presentations began, I started getting bewildered. I had told myself, what can anyone, let alone students in engineering colleges, even in IITs, create by way of prototypes in six weeks? Maybe they would show us PowerPoint presentations of the product ideas that they could dream up in the six short weeks they had. What followed was a complete surprise to me.
 

When each team got on the podium and presented their idea, it was not just a PowerPoint presentation of an idea, they showed a physical product.
 

For example, there was a team which showed a bottle cap to use on bottles that contained liquids that you needed to pour out in measured quantities. They demonstrated how a user could rotate a shaft in the bottle cap and set it to pour a specific quantity of liquid in the bottle, say 50 ml, and when you tilted the bottle and poured it would pour just that quantity. In other words, you didn’t need to measure in a cup the quantity that you poured each time … that was done automatically. The inventors felt it would help those who had to take medicines regularly, for example. I was mystified as to how the team could build it physically in a mere six weeks.
 

Then there was a “mountable garbage compactor”, which one could mount on the typical municipal dustbins we see all over our cities. This, when put as a lid on a garbage can, can compress the content, allowing more garbage to be put into the same bin. In other words, this “compactor” could ensure that a typical municipal dustbin could carry four or five times the amount of garbage it normally carried. My surprise was how/why these kids thought of solving a problem like making garbage collection more efficient. My generation of IIT/IIM kids lived with mathematical models filling their brain and hardly ever thought of finding tech solutions like improving the life of citizens of Bharat.
 

In my day of surprises, the one that most pleasantly jolted me was when a team with a young man and a young woman got on to the podium to present their prototype: A small portable device with an air-compression bag that can, for example, be strapped around your calf muscle if you suffer from chronic muscle pain. In addition, the pad could be filled with a pain-relieving ointment. This was a wonderful, new idea which as a former athlete/football fanatic I could relate to. But the true wonder was that the inventor team on stage was a young man and (hold your breath) a young woman! A woman inventor? I know women in India have risen to many decision-making levels: A large number of major banks in India have women chief executive officers, and India’s finance minister (perhaps the best we have ever had) is a woman. But a young 20-something girl as a co-inventor of a breakthrough consumer gadget? It struck me instantly that India seems to have made tremendous progress as a civilisation when you see young women at the top level of inventors, and there were several that day.
 

Each of the teams that demonstrated their prototypes that day also included a description about the patentability of their invention — both a statement of how their invention was different and an improvement on other such devices in the market, and (hold your breath, now) got a provisional patent in India and the United States!
 

The 10 presentations/demonstrations we saw that day had been shortlisted from 700 applicants from across the IITs and similar engineering institutions. The organiser of this is a non-profit called the Maker Bhavan Foundation, started by IIT alumni in the United States.
 

In recent years, India has recognised that startups and “skills” are key contributors to the growth and employment creation in our country: The National Skill Development Mission, Aatmanirbhar, and the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship all run multiple programmes at the central and state levels. And India also has its share of financial entities looking to invest in startups. But how the “invention factory” movement differs from all of them is its focus on the creation of actual physical devices which are original (= patentable) and not merely PowerPoint presentations that spell out three-year cash flows and market share forecasts.
 

And, thus, most importantly, focus on “invention”, not “innovation”.

The writer  (ajitb@rediffmail.com) is an internet entrepreneur