Three key aspects of innovation – Dr Naushad Forbes

Centre to set up data centres in Odisha’s capital city Bhubaneswar and Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad
Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Report by OD Bureau, Pune: The government is going to set up four data centres in Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad and Bhubaneswar. Apart from these, individual level data centers will also be built at state level offices for monitoring and connectivity.

This was stated by Mr Sam Pitroda, Advisor to the Prime Minister on Public Information Infrastructure & Innovation and Chairman, National Innovation Council. He was speaking at Decade of Innovation: India @ Year 2, the innovation summit organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Global Innovation and Technology Alliance (GITA) and National Innovation Council.

Releasing the first issue of the quarterly publication of Indian innovations prepared by GITA and Technology Development Board (TDB), Department of Science and Technology (DST), Mr Pitroda said that the effort was commendable and the country needed a comprehensive database of next generation innovations.

Mr Pitroda also gave away the GE India Innovation Award on this occasion to a student from IITKanpur for designing a wheel chair which can manoeuver stairs. He called for a billion dollar fund to feed on innovative ideas from bottom of the pyramid which are scalable and sustainable. Overall attempt of the government will be to help industry to invest more in research and development, innovation, supporting small and medium enterprises through incentives and schemes and add sectoral clusters for collaborative capacity building, he said.

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

Speaking on this occasion, Mr Harkesh Mittal, Secretary, TDB and Co-Chairman of 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 per cent 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 this occasion, emphasized on the role of academia in spawning innovations.

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

Ref : Orissadiary.com