Creating new tech best way forward for India

NEW DELHI, INDIA: From the significance of liberal arts in education to the challenge of reconciling unemployment and efficiency; from comparisons between India and China to the issue of brain drain; from creating locally ingenious solutions that can be translated globally to entrepreneurship. Speakers and students avidly discussed leveraging India's unique position in the global context at a dialogue held at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.

The message that rang clear was that change will be the only constant. "We have before us a global construct where chaos will be a given, where innovation will drive the markets and where a model for sustainability will have to come out of shared visions and goals."

Two eminent speakers, Soumitra Dutta, professor of business at Technology at INSEAD, France and Dean Designate of Cornell University's Johnson Business School of Management and also an alumnus of IIT Delhi, and Wilfried Aulbur, managing partner , Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, India fired the imagination of young students on how to leverage their talent and education to co-create a more inclusive and better India.

Soumitra Dutta highlighted two prompts for innovation: "technological push", where new technologies create whole new industries, and "market pull", where existing technologies are cleverly combined to create viable market solutions. Dutta argued that in order to maintain ground on the global stage, India should increase investment in original research, development, and production of new technologies.

Dutta stressed the need for India to increase investment in original research, development, and production of new technologies.

Aulbur said businesses will need to adapt from having a global presence to being globally integrated. Finally, highly effective operating models must be designed to manage the transformation into a more agile, flexible, and efficient engineering organisation.

InDialogues, organised by design and strategy firm Ideaworks, is an initiative to bring together a cross-sectoral group of leaders who hold a range of viewpoints. "Dialogues work because they bring different kinds of people together around relevant issues and create a space that enables constructive conversations. Dialogues entail partnerships which create the necessary framework for positive change," Amit Shahi, CEO & Co-founder, theIdeaWorks, said.