Indian Innovation

Kumar and Puranam study a new, more visible, consumer-oriented kind of innovation emerging in India of compact, low-cost, robust, and efficient products. New products such as Tata's Nano, Going Green's G-Wiz car, and GE's ECG machine exemplify this unique kind of Indian innovation which is marked by robustness.

What does innovation mean to and in India? What are the predominant areas of innovation for India, and under what situations do they succeed or fail? This book addresses these all-important questions arising within diverse Indian contexts: informal economy, low-cost settings, large business groups, entertainment and copyright-based industries, an evolving pharma sector, a poorly organized and appallingly underfunded public health system, social enterprises for the urban poor, and innovations for the millions. It explores the issues that promote and those that hinder the country’s rise as an innovation leader. The book’s balanced perspective on India's promises and failings makes it a valuable addition for those who believe that India's future banks heavily on its ability to leapfrog using innovation, as well as those sceptical of the Indian state's belief in the potential of private enterprise and innovation. It also provides critical insights on innovation in general, the most important of which being the highly context-specific, context-driven character of the innovation project.

In 2010, India celebrated its 60th anniversary as an independent sovereign republic. India is the fourth largest economy by gross domestic product. Economically, it is building itself as a formidable force and global influence. At the same time India has fundamental challenges: its inequities are visible; its young population tread a thin line between opportunity and pitfall; its infrastructure has gaping holes; and it’s a slow chaotic democracy. This book establishes that in spite of these challenges, a new India is emerging out of the old, colliding more often than collaborating with the old India. Much of the new India is built on the economic momentum established 20 years ago and built by private entrepreneurs. The new economic climate, together with talent and entrepreneurship, is also making India a net supplier of innovation. Going by current trends, India will become an innovation super power by 2035. This book will establish that India is not just leveraging innovation for global competitiveness alone, but is also leveraging innovation as the specific instrument for inclusive growth. This book identifies gaps in the current innovation ecosystem and recommends a portfolio approach and calls for a National Innovation System (NIS) as a blueprint to fix the gaps. It suggests that for India to succeed in identifying, funding and sustaining a balanced innovation portfolio, India will also have to succeed in eliminating poverty, increase its rural GDP manifold, and provide employment, education and health for all its citizens. Click Here to view the official page for this title on Facebook. Establishes and analyses the trends that support India’s global emergence as an Innovation Superpower Identifies three critical levels of innovation namely grassroots innovation, national innovation and innovation for global competitiveness Recommends a portfolio approach as a blueprint for the creation of a National Innovation System

Dinesh C. Sharma is a New Delhi-based award-winning journalist and author with over thirty-five years’ of professional experience. He has written extensively on science and technology, climate change, health, environment and innovation for national and international media, including The Lancet and Wired. He has been Science Editor at Mail Today, and Managing Editor at India Science Wire and is currently the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow (2020-2021). His book The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution was awarded the Computer History Museum Book Prize in 2016. He has also been a visiting faculty at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Ateneo de Manila University, Manila. Dinesh Sharma tweets at @dineshcsharma

20 ZEALOUS INDIANS. 20 PATH-BREAKING INNOVATIONS. ONE COMMON VISION! Indian Innovators traces the journey of 20 dynamic individuals, who have created cutting-edge products with global mass appeal. Each innovator comes from diverse backgrounds – from those who hold a PhD to those who have had no formal education! Despite this difference, what unites them is their passion for innovation, the grit with which they have fought adversities and their vision for a better world. Each story celebrates the triumphant spirit of these determined individuals in a society that places little incentive on innovation. These innovators have resolved to break the status quo in the Indian innovation landscape! Akshat Agarwal holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from IIT-Delhi and an MBA from the US. During his IIT days, he was engaged in the design and fabrication of an artificial knee joint for above-the-knee amputees. Akshat is currently a Director at Alpha Beta Classes, an innovative start-up in online and offline education that aims to improve access to quality education for millions in India.

A vivid look at how India has developed the idea of entrepreneurial citizens as leaders mobilizing society and how people try to live that promise Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? In Chasing Innovation, Lilly Irani shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate. Irani documents the rise of "entrepreneurial citizenship" in India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class in one of the world’s fastest-growing nations. Drawing on her own professional experience as a Silicon Valley designer and nearly a decade of fieldwork following a Delhi design studio, Irani vividly chronicles the practices and mindsets that hold up professional design as the answer to the challenges of a country of more than one billion people, most of whom are poor. While discussions of entrepreneurial citizenship promise that Indian children can grow up to lead a nation aspiring to uplift the poor, in reality, social, economic, and political structures constrain whose enterprise, which hopes, and which needs can be seen as worthy of investment. In the process, Irani warns, powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies exploit citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope in the quest to generate economic value. Irani argues that the move to recast social change as innovation, with innovators as heroes, frames others—craftspeople, workers, and activists—as of lower value, or even dangers to entrepreneurial forms of development. With meticulous historical context and compelling stories, Chasing Innovation lays bare how long-standing power hierarchies such as class, caste, language, and colonialism continue to shape opportunity in a world where good ideas supposedly rule all.

"Examines the evolution of sectoral system of innovation in industries that are important to India's economic development"--

What drives innovation and entrepreneurship in India, China, and the United States? Our data-rich and evidence-based exploration of relationships among innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth yields theoretical models of economic growth in the context of macroeconomic factors. Because we know far too little about the key characteristics of Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs and the ways they innovate, our balanced, systematic comparison of entrepreneurship and innovation results in a new approach to looking at economic growth that can be used to model empirical data from other countries. The importance of innovation and entrepreneurship to any economy has been recognized since the pioneering work of Joseph Schumpeter. Our analysis of the major factors that affect innovation and entrepreneurship in these three parts of the world – US, China and India –provides a comprehensive view of their effects and their likely futures. Looks at elements important for innovation and entrepreneurship and compares them against each other within the three countries Places theoretical modeling of economic growth in the context of the overall macroeconomic factors Explores questions about the relationships among innovation, entrepreneurship and economic growth in China, India and the US