Read any recent publication or listen to any business or political leader, you will often find them extolling the virtues of innovation. India needs to innovate, India needs an innovation ecosystem, everyone innovates are some of the common exhortations frequently repeated with messianic zeal. Innovation seems to be a panacea for most challenges, faced by Indian firms, public institutions and even the society at large. With everyone, including the firms from the new and old economies, start-ups, staid government research institutions, public sector behemoths busy innovating, innovation is certainly a part of the Indian spirit today. 

I do believe that a heavy dose of innovation is required to address both business and social problems as the old approaches are not being able to deliver. With the factor based competitiveness of many sectors of the Indian industry are gradually eroding, possessing an innovation capability is sine qua non for the survival and growth of firms. Similarly public institutions will need to innovate to address the growing challenges of healthcare, primary education, agriculture etc.

However, a thought, which niggles away is that while India undoubtedly needs innovation, perhaps global innovation equally needs India.

Several challenges

In-spite of the recent surge in the nation’s economy and the general sense of ‘India has arrived’, we continue to face severe challenges on many fronts.  Affordable but world-class healthcare for every Indian, high infant mortality, quality primary education for every Indian child, increasing agricultural yield, poverty eradication etc are complex problems, which continue to bedevil us. Thirty crore (300 million) Indians live on less than US$1 a day and 45 per cent of Indian children under the age of five are malnourished.

Less than a third of India’s homes have a toilet and only half of five lakh villages are connected to the electricity grid. Falling agriculture productivity is threatening to turn India into a net importer of food for the first time since the green revolution.

But these problems are not unique to India. Large parts of the world population inhabiting Africa, South and Central Asia, and large parts of Latin America faces similar challenges in education, healthcare, agriculture etc. These are not only issues confined to the developing world as apparently due to high cost of healthcare in the US, apparently several million people with no medical insurance are denied access to good quality healthcare.

Fertile ground
Addressing these complex ‘global’ problems will require breakthrough innovations along multiple dimensions as the tried and tested approaches are not delivering. Innovation is often born out of adversity—greater the adversity, perhaps more is the probability of disruptive innovations. Therefore for these innovations to succeed, they will need to be created in the environment where the problem exists instead of merely being replicated from a context where the problems are considered as someone else’s problem.

This is where India has a unique opportunity for becoming a crucible for global innovation instead of aspiring merely to be the world’s back-office and front-office. A world-class IT industry, wide array of skills in large numbers, a large science & technology infrastructure, unsurpassed cultural diversity, ‘can-do’ attitude of one of the world’ youngest populations endow India with a unique and unmatched confluence of factors to make this happen.

But above all, India provides an environment for incubating these innovations because for any innovation to succeed, it needs to be contextual to the problem and get developed close to the target user. The so-called ‘insurmountable’ problems of India actually represent market discontinuities and thereby provide a fertile ground for innovations to happen. There are already several examples of this. Successful innovations like the Aravind Eye hospital or the Jaipur polio foot required a context in which they were conceptualised and made successful.
Combining cutting-edge technologies including wireless, smart-cards, bio-metrics etc and an innovative business model of taking the ‘bank to the customer’, a private sector bank in India is attempting to provide modern banking facilities to millions of Indians who being migrant workers are often denied access to modern banking facilities simply due to the lack of verifiable addresses and archaic banking procedures.

The success of the one rupee shampoo sachet required a customer segment which could not often afford the large shampoo bottle and if they were able to purchase it, they often lacked space to store it. 

Transforming India into a lab for global innovations is not going to be easy as there are no off the shelf prescriptions available. For this to happen, existing dogmas and ‘givens’ will need to be replaced by fresh thinking, aversion to failure will need to give way to boldness to experiment and a desire for the disruptive will need to overcome the acceptance of incrementalism. However, there are two things, which are perhaps more crucial than others.

National aspirations
Firstly, collective national innovation aspirations are needed, which transcend the ordinary and provide a galvanising effect. In his landmark ‘land a man on the moon’ speech at Rice University, J F Kennedy said that it will not be one man going to the moon but the entire nation. This national aspiration motivated individuals and institutions in the USA and resulted in game-changing innovations in diverse areas, which otherwise may not have happened.

Secondly, the innovation dots need to be connected. Successful innovations are often created through the intersection of multiple technologies originating in diverse industries and institutions and therefore creating sustainable linkages among innovation ecosystem constituents in India is a pre-requisite for realising any game-changing innovation aspirations.

As a civilisation, if not yet as a nation, Indian inventions and innovations have benefited the world immensely, especially in science and medicine. Once again today, there is a unique happenstance when the billion problems of India can become a billion opportunities for innovations, which not only benefit India but also perhaps provide succour to the rest of the world. That will truly make the 21st century India’s century.

The writer is Vice President, NASSCOM. Views are personal