Going beyond mere research laboratories, India must build a powerful national innovation ecosystem comprising robust physical, intellectual and cultural constructs
Historically, second decade of the 21st century is witnessing the rise of global innovation competition. Thus Silicon Valleys of the future are expected to emerge from Taipei, Shanghai, Helsinki and Tel Aviv. India should be an exciting player in this competition and it should play to win. India has begun well by declaring the decade of 2011-20 as the decade of innovation. How can India emerge as a leader in innovation in the next couple of decades?
First and foremost is our resolve that the ‘I’ in India will not stand for ‘imitation’ or ‘inhibition’, but only for ‘innovation’. This will require a major shift of mindset at all levels.
Innovators are those who see what everyone sees, but think of what no one else thinks. Innovators refuse status quo, they convert inspirations into solutions and ideas into products. Building such innovators requires an all-pervasive attitudinal change towards life and work — a shift from a culture of drift to a culture of dynamism, form a culture of prattle to a culture of thought and work, from diffidence to confidence, from despair to hope. Revival of Indian creativity and the innovative spirit needs to be made into a national movement today, in the same spirit and on the same scale as marked our freedom struggle.
Second, Indian innovation needs to be directed towards the national goal of ‘inclusive growth’. This will create an ‘inclusive society’. Today, we have an interesting challenge. With rapid growth, income inequality between our top 10 per cent and the bottom 10 per cent is increasing. This increasing income inequality will create social disharmony. The only way we can prevent this from happening is to create an ‘access equality’ despite the ‘income inequality’. And this means access to education, health, housing, transport, communication, financial services etc for the resource poor population. And this can be done only through innovation, more specifically, innovation directed creatively towards inclusion, or in other words, ‘inclusive innovation’.
Are we achieving this? The answer is yes, because India’s prowess in inclusive innovation is changing the vocabulary of innovation itself. Indian scenario
Inspired by India, we find the entry of new terms like frugal innovation, reverse innovation, nanovation, Gandhian innovation and even Indovation! Recently, CK Prahlad and I co-authored a paper titled ‘Innovation’s Holy Grail’ in Harvard Business Review, introducing the idea of ‘Gandhian innovation’ there. We talked about getting more from less for more and more people — not just for more and more profit. More from less for more (MLM) has caught the imagination of the world. World Economic Forum had a half a day session on MLM last year. A $2000 Tata Nano car inspired the American couple Kevin and Jackie Freiberg author a Penguin book ‘Nanovation’.
Indian inclusive innovation is meeting impossible price-performance targets possible. Can we make a recombinant DNA hepatitis-B vaccine available at a price that is 40 times lower with such a high quality that it captures 40 per cent of the UNICEF market? Can we make a cataract surgery available at a cost that is 100 times lower with a quality that is better than what Royal College of Ophthalmic surgeons in London are able to achieve? India has done it. Chhotukool, a refrigerator costing $70, Akash, a computer tablet costing $35 etc are clear game changers. GE Medical team in India made the low cost portable ECG machine, which inspired GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt to propound the concept of ‘reverse innovation’, predicting that countries like India will become the fountain heads of original innovations, which will migrate to the West.
In the decade ahead, India can aspire to become a leader in inclusive innovation, which will be achieved through not only technological innovation (Nano) but also business process innovation (lowest cost mobile cell phone calls), workflow innovation (Aravind Eye Care) and so on. And many other paradigm shifts will occur.
Third Indian innovation challenge is going to be that of traversing the journey from mind to market place at a brisk and competitive pace. But, in India, we have this challenge of pleasure being followed by pain, when it comes to this journey.
Pleasure, when Ashok Jhunjhunwala develops wireless local loop technology. Pain, when this technology has to get implemented in Brazil and Madagascar first before moving to India. Pleasure, when an Indian drugs and pharma company has an innovative breakthrough on head and neck cancer. Pain, when the company is forced to do expensive clinical research in USA and Europe due to the long delays in regulatory approvals in India. Pleasure, when a great leader in Indian science has some unique breakthrough on carbon nanotubes and publishes them in top scientific research journals. Pain, with when his ideas not having been patented before, a Japanese company is found to regularly take patents by tweaking his ideas in these research papers. A case of Indian ideas creating wealth, but in Japan, not in India!
The strategy
So what is needed is a realisation of some fundamentals. Research converts money in to knowledge, but it is innovation that converts that knowledge in to money. We have been very good in doing the first part, the research laboratories in our country have been involved in creating knowledge out of the funding that they’ve received but not many have been able to convert that knowledge in to money. In order to create money out of knowledge firstly the knowledge needs to be monetisable. Creating knowledge that is monetisable needs special strategies — and its monetisation poses even a greater challenge.
Let us learn from scientists like George M Whitesides of Harvard University and Richard Friend of University of Cambridge. They show us how to first create monetisable knowledge and then how to monetise it, while remaining leaders in science. For instance, Whitesides, who has been tipped for a Nobel Prize, has co-founded over a dozen companies (including Genzyme, GelTex, Theravance, Surface Logix and WMR Biomedical), which have a combined market capitalisation of about $30 billion.
There is nothing wrong in linking Saraswati to Lakshmi. There is nothing wrong in researchers going for patents. Even Nobel Laureates, who add to the global pool of knowledge, patent their work. Karl Barry Sharpless, the 2001 Noble Laureate in chemistry, has the highest number of patents.
Skills in filing, reading and exploiting patents will be most crucial in the years to come. Manpower planning for IPR protection needs priority. IPR must be made a compulsory subject matter in the law courses in the universities in India. Our graduates coming out of engineering and technology streams have no idea about IPR, and yet it is these young people, who will have to fight these emerging wars in the knowledge markets. A number of patent training institutes will have to be set up. Judicious management of patent information will require well-structured functioning of information creating centres, information documenters and retrievers, information users, IPR specialists and information technology experts.
Fourth, we must recognise that India has not only 1.2 billion mouths but 1.2 billion minds. Each one of them can innovate. The unique genes of almost every Indian for innovation became evident to me while chairing the National Innovation Foundation and Marico Innovation Foundation. That even an ordinary Indian in a remote village can innovate has been demonstrated by Anil Gupta’s pioneering Shodh Yatras in villages. The research by Marico Innovation Foundation in typically Indian innovation has brought out how some Indians make the seemingly impossible possible. We must give a space for recognition, rewards and a space for growth for all such innovations.
Fifth, and final, we must build a powerful twenty first century national innovation ecosystem comprising robust physical, intellectual and cultural constructs. Beyond mere research labs it includes idea incubators, technology parks, conducive intellectual property rights regime, enlightened regulatory systems, academics who believe in not just ‘publish or perish’, but ‘patent, publish and prosper’, potent inventor-investor engagement, venture capital that is truly an ‘ad’venture capital, and passionate innovation leaders.
Let this journey in this ‘Indian Decade of Innovation’ be rewarding not just for some privileged Indians but all Indians. Let the destination of this journey be one, where India will eventually reinvent itself and re-emerge as leading innovative nation, as it always was in the millennia gone by.
The author is chairman, Marico Innovation Foundation, & National Research Professor at NCL
