Decade of Innovation India@ Year 2: A Journey Towards Innovation Driven Economy

‘Decade of Innovation India@ Year 2: A Journey Towards Innovation Driven Economy,’ the flagship innovation event of the Global Innovation & Technology Alliance (GITA), CII, and the National Innovation Council (NInC) was organized on 30-31 October in New Delhi. Prominent speakers from India and abroad, including industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and representatives of government and institutions, shared their experiences in innovations.

Inaugurating the event, Mr. Sam Pitroda, Advisor to the Prime Minister on Public Information Infrastructure & Innovation, and Chairman, National Innovation Council, spoke about the four data centers that the Government is going to set up in Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad and Bhubaneswar. Apart from these, individual level data centers are to be built at the state level for monitoring and connectivity, he said.

The first issue of the quarterly publication of Indian innovations prepared by GITA and the Technology Development Board (TDB), Department of Science and Technology (DST), was released during the event.

Mr Pitroda also gave away the GE India Innovation Award to a student from IIT-Kanpur for designing a wheel chair which can manoeuver stairs. GE sponsored Rs.1 lakh as award money for the innovator, along with a trophy and citation. He called for a billion dollar fund to feed on innovative ideas from the bottom of the pyramid which are scalable and sustainable. The Government will help industry to invest more in R&D and innovation, support small and medium enterprises through incentives and schemes and add sectoral clusters for collaborative capacity building, he said.

Dr Naushad Forbes, Chairman, CII Committee on Innovation, and Director, Forbes Marshall, highlighted three aspects of innovation. One, innovation was usually viewed as something esoteric and other-worldly but it need not necessarily be so. Two, innovation was generally taken to mean as connected with technology whereas it went much beyond that and could be anything from a portable waste management device to an interesting board game for a child. Three, people always looked for big-bang innovations overlooking the incremental innovations which were often equally significant and life-changing.

Mr Harkesh Mittal, Secretary, TDB, and Co-Chairman, GITA, said that investment in innovation gave returns in multiples of four—for instance, an annual investment of $55 billion could lead to a 3 % increase in gross domestic product at $230 billion.

Prof Giora Yaron, Chairman of the Board, Executive Council of Tel Aviv University, who was present on the occasion, described the role of academia in spawning innovations.

Mr Chandrajit Banerjee, Director General, CII, appreciated the Government’s efforts in creating innovative vehicles such as GITA to promote industrial R&D.