Innovation In India

This NYT story by Vikas Bajaj on anxiety over the slow pace of innovation in India covers all the usual suspects - bureaucracy, corruption, years of stifling central planning, restrictive import tariffs, emphasis rote learning when it comes to eduction and general risk aversion. With all of that innovation is reduced to mere "jugaad" - the formal term is probably "denial driven innovation".

One contributing factor the author neglects to mention is that desis are blessed with high degree of tolerance and the natural ability to accept status quo as karma for the most part. We are not a people given to shaking things up as a matter of course, indeed a lot of us have never had a pressing need to do so.

Innovation and entrepreneurship in India is probably the highest among those communities who experienced upheaval at the time of India gaining Independence. They came in through the western border and fanned around, rooting where conditions were most hospitable. Many left Indian shores to seek their fortunes abroad. These communities  continue to be among the wealthiest and possessed of the greatest spirit of enterprise.

Perhaps they always had the wherewithal to do all of the things they did but adversity became the impetus that pushed them to an entirely different level of resourcefulness. On the east of the border, where families were uprooted from Bangladesh and headed to Kolkata and its vicinities, the story unfolded quite differently for a variety of reasons but that is a whole different topic of discussion.

For the vast majority of educated, middle class Indians, the would be innovators of this century, there has been little need to stick out their necks and take big risks or try something drastically because their survival depended on it. As resources shrink rapidly, the burgeoning population will be forced out of its comfort zone whether they like it or not. To that end, the reliance of a variety of "jugaad" and engagement in multifarious "dhanda" will increasingly become a way of life. It is the knee jerk response ( and not always a harmful one) to the need to do more with less.

Innovation (disruptive and otherwise) will likely happen as a subsequent phase in this process of evolution. It would be unreasonable to expect a Silicon Valley style startup incubation ecosystem in Bangalore but that does not mean innovation will not happen in India - it will just be of a very different flavor and like the taste of "curry" it would take some getting used to specially for those in the Western world. Many examples of such enterprise abound already.

It is just as Iqbal Quadir puts it while discussing the use of mobile phones to transfer money in India and Philippines :

Thus, when technologies—no matter where or why they were invented—are applied to diverse contexts, they provide a foundation for previously undreamed-of permutations and combinations. 

The numbers turn phenomenally large when one talks about India. We have more than our fair share of problems but in each of them, the enterprise-minded would see opportunity when permuted and combined with technology.

Interesting Times

Nice article on the the future of educational institutes as the hub of scientific research and technology innovation. The author points out :

While there are advanced capabilities that remain available only on campus, that boundary is rapidly receding.

This moment is akin to the turn of the last century, when philanthropists funded the spread of libraries to provide community access to the kinds of collections that had previously been available only to institutions and wealthy individuals. Fab labs are like libraries for a new kind of literacy, the reading and writing of objects rather than books. Instead of building a few big labs, it’s now possible to build a network of many more-accessible smaller labs that can be used for technical empowerment, training, incubation, and invention.

That is nothing short of fascinating. Today's children would probably have access to such labs by when they are adults. Besides the mind-boggling array possibilities that opens up for them, there is also unprecedented amount of choice and empowerment when it comes to education. One can easily imagine courses being tailored to exact individual needs and inclinations, students having the opportunity to create a curriculum for themselves that might require concurrent enrollment at several universities around the world for the best return on their investment of time and money. Instead of walking down the hallway from one lecture to the next, they may log in and out of university portals continents apart.

Book Scanning

It's no big news that Google does some really cool stuff - be it getting goats to graze on their lawns instead of using a lawn-mower or rigging up some kind of infra-red contraption to scan books without opening them. While most of us may not be able to get goats to graze in our backyards, we would all find plenty of use for a portable camera book scanner.

First it was e-publishing and Kindle that was threatening the survival of the old fashioned book but with such a device, every customer browsing in a bookstore could mean lost revenue instead of a potential sale. Yet in every innovation that promises to be the death of the old way, there is often hidden opportunity waiting to be discovered and monetized. Inside a book-scanner there may be ways to generate buzz for goods and services relevant to text being scanned - and that is just the most obvious idea. It would only be a matter of time before much better ones came along.

Failed Innovation

Micheal Mandel blames where America is today on the failed promise of innovation in this Business Week article. Among the several indicators he cites that point to the lack of innovation is this really telling one :

The final piece of evidence is the financial crisis itself. After the 2001 tech bust, trillions of dollars flowed into the U.S.—but most of it went into government bonds and housing rather than into innovative sectors of the economy. While subprime mortgages boomed, venture capital investments have more or less stagnated since 2001, with few tech startups going public.

A lot of readers blame the paucity in innovation on the intellectual property litigation. While it's contribution cannot be denied, many would argue it is important to have the checks and balances in place so IP gets the protection it deserves. It does not help that that countries with lax or unenforced IP laws have not been the hotbed of innovation because it weakens the litigation argument somewhat.

Having experienced the dot-com bust and some of the euphoria preceding, it appeared that public appetite for all innovation had vanished once the house of ill-conceived e-commerce venture cards came tumbling down. The malaise of the IT sector seemed to have tainted things that had nothing to do with it. Instead of finding the next cool thing to bet on, people simply stopped placing bets altogether. If anything, the average person learned to be wary of investing in technology and products that they did not quite understand or found too intangible to be comfortable with. In that sense the dot-com bubble preempted innovation in other sectors that may have otherwise happened.