Innovation at warp speed

Book review of The Ventilator Project

Around mid-March 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi put out a call seeking indigenous solutions to counter the Covid-19 crisis. A small Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur-incubated startup called Nocca Robotics responded with an interest in making ventilators. Things moved swiftly after that. A task force comprising mentors and members from the IIT Kanpur incubator quickly coalesced around the young founders of Nocca Robotics and the IIT-K ventilator project was formed. 

But at every subsequent stage, the team was swimming upstream. In a world constrained by lockdowns, the team had to constantly devise new game plans to navigate a maze of