Is India an Innovation Giant… or Pygmy?

The sky is no longer the limit for what the innovative Indian mind can achieve. Or so I thought on April 28, as I witnessed with awe and pride India’s launch of 10 satellites with an indigenously built rocket. India became the only country in the world to use a 100% indigenously built rocket to propel that many satellites in one launch. The timing was perfect. I was half-way through my field research project in India to investigate how the center of gravity of global creativity and innovation is shifting from the West (where I spent the last half of my life) to the East (where I spent the first half of my life). Like a space rocket returning to its base after a long orbital flight, I felt my own life was coming full circle. Through my interactions with senior Indian corporate execs, I discovered with excitement that India is rapidly becoming the global launching pad for innovative products, services, processes, and even business models. Interestingly, these Made-In-India innovations are led not only by visionary domestic firms like the Reliance Industries, Bharti Enterprises, and Tata Motors (which had just launched Nano, the world’s cheapest car priced at $2,500 – more on this coming in my next post). They were also led by enlightened multinationals like SAP, IBM, and Cisco (which is literally reinventing its business model out of India – more on that in a future blog post). Before I got carried away by Indian’s space technology prowess, I was brought back to earth by a series of events and reports that highlighted the huge “meteors” confronting the Indian economic rocket on its orbital path to tech-innovation-fueled economic superpower status. IMD reported that India’s position has slipped in its ranking of the world’s most competitive economies. India’s crumbling infrastructure was singled out as the main culprit. Earlier, a report by the state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector disclosed that India’s innovation prowess has yet to benefit the masses. While India’s GDP per capita has tripled in the last sixteen years thanks to a swelling middle class, 77% of India’s population still earns less than 1 dollar per day. While these dire statistics merely point to the fact that India’s economic cup is still half empty, what surprised me more was the cynicism and skepticism with which India’s latest innovations were received in some circles. I sensed an active refusal to acknowledge that the same cup could be already half-full and filling up even more, and faster. Take the Nano: several influential media columnists complained about the “severe environmental damage” that the 250,000 Nanos brought to market each year are about to cause. But these critics fail to realize that the auto rickshaws these Nanos are supposed to replace actually cause the worst pollution in Indian roads. Meanwhile, an Indian minister complained in Parliament that the meager 0.11% of GDP that India invests in basic science and technology (S&T) research yields poor quality inventions: Indian researchers are producing only 2.16% of world’s S&T publications. Yet, the Indian Space Research Organization needed much less than 0.11% of India’s GDP to build a powerful rocket able to carry 10 satellites! Let’s get real: when I left India in 1989 for France, two years before its economic liberalization began, India’s economic cup was nearly empty, and no “thinker” inside or outside India believed that the Indian society had the innovative capacity to fill that cup by even a quarter. All those naysayers are now proven wrong by creative firms like Reliance Industries and Tata Group, both of which today figure among BusinessWeek’s top 10 innovative firms in the world. My current research in India convinces me that while India has yet to become an innovation giant, it is surely no longer an innovation pygmy. Far from it. Sixty years after gaining political freedom and 16 years after achieving economic independence, India is at a tipping point in its history. India’s tech innovation capacity, however frugal and constrained it may be by poor infrastructure and regulations, is about to drive exponential economic growth across all Indian socio-economic strata. I want to back this assertion by sharing with you some amazing business and societal innovations emanating from India that I witnessed first-hand, both in large corporations headquartered in glitzy Mumbai as well as at the grassroots level in remote Tamil Nadu villages. I would like to showcase the visionary organizations and people driving these amazing business and societal innovations, and describe their innovation philosophy. And I would love to get your feedback on them. But I also need your creative input: let’s identify the socio-political and economic challenges that could dampen India’s innovation potential and brainstorm on this forum how Indian tech entrepreneurs can turn these liabilities into opportunities. A confident India has already learned how to crawl along the innovation-led global growth path. I look forward to discussing with you how it can stand up and run fast on that exciting path.

Is India an Innovation Giant… or Pygmy?

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