Innovation's Holy Grail: 'Do good to do well'

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The session, 'Making India an Innovation Nation', at TiE Entrepreneurial Summit 2010, saw some of the heavy-weights in the high-achievement circuit take centre-stage about making India an innovative country. Some excerpts:

Saurabh Srivastava, Chairman, Computer Associates India

India is an innovative country. We invented the zero which gave rise to the digital revolution. We created many religions. However, we missed the industrialization for almost 200 years because of colonization. But we have now emerged. We have 70 million people in the job stream every year today. This is an era of industrialization and globalization for India.

Richard Stagg, High Commissioner, UK

Unlike in the past, when we were in the license-Raj, business in India won’t be dependent on government. Challenges faced by India cannot be resolved with traditional methods and you will have to apply innovative solutions.

UK is has a very high cost economy and it has to keep ahead with the low-cost competitors. UK today has no area of competitive edge so innovation is inevitable.

In India, there is a bigger spark of entrepreneurship and compared to UK, it is more driven by the need of the people than in the UK.

UK is doing a $100 million research with DST for innovation in a number of areas. We are also working to bring these ideas out of the labs. We want to turn these ideas into useful services and products.

Dr R.A. Mashelkar, chairman, National Innovation Foundation

We have to encourage innovation and not inhibition and imitation. One of my friends couldn’t clear IIT but he studied Physics and then turned to Biology and went to win the Nobel.

Some Indians are doing well, when will India do well? I am missing Prof. C.K. Prahlad here. Prof Prahlad wrote a paper titled: Innovation’s Holy Grail, where he talked about businesses doing well while doing good. Prof Prahlad had said: “We have four billion people in the world living with less than $4 a day, so we have to think of ultra-low-cost rather than low-cost.”

Think in terms of disruptive innovation and not incremental innovation. India specializes in disruptive innovation. In some groups abroad, innovation is often called Indovation.

Shekar Kapur, Film Maker

I realised that our population is our biggest asset and not a problem as it is made out to be. There are parts in India which grows at the rate of 25 per cent while others have negative growth.

Power of India lies in her managing the bottom of the pyramid. At the Bottom of The Pyramid (BTP) we are a huge nation of entrepreneurs. It is the survival instinct that drives people into entrepreneurship.

We hold in ourselves principles ideas and philosophy. We need to energize them and help connect the huge innovate spring at the BTP.