Value centric innovation

In my previous blog(month of Jan 09), I touched upon on the need to focus on innovating on the basic needs (air, water, food, hygiene, shelter, and education). Complimentary to this is, we need innovation to stem the degrading values. We may not find many who support this concern and look to the others as a reason for falling values in the system. Those who support this cause are very few in numbers. Hence, something needs to be done here quickly. Values are key elements for the very purpose of existence of humankind. Values provide meaning to life. Finding ways to inculcate the value system in our day-to-day dealing is an area for innovation.
If the purpose of innovation is to create wealth by any means then we have it all wrong. Showcasing people as successful innovators based only wealth and power are bad example to the rest of the world, leading to the snowballing of the degrading values whose consequence is disaster in time.

What could be a possible way for innovation in India?

India can benefit from fostering more inclusive innovation—by promoting more formal R&D efforts for poor people. Need to have more creative grassroots efforts, and by improving the ability of informal enterprises to exploit existing knowledge. Existing pro-poor initiatives need to be scaled up. Inclusive innovation can play a critical role in lowering the costs of goods and services and in creating income-earning opportunities for poor people.
The National Innovation Foundation has a repository of more than 50,000 grassroots innovations and traditional knowledge practices. And a number of initiatives exist to help the informal sector better absorb knowledge. More favorable matching grant support for pro-poor early-stage technology development could significantly increase collaboration among public R&D entities, universities, non-governmental organizations, national industries, and global networks. Increased support for grassroots innovators could be provided to the National Innovation Foundation to scale up impact. To leverage traditional knowledge into revenue, a policy-oriented intellectual property rights think tank could propose how to implement a cheaper intellectual property regime. Finally, successful technology upgrading programs could be extended to help informal and rural enterprises make better use of existing knowledge.

What kind of innovation do we need in India?

The country seems to swing between two extremities, at one end we are investing and making progress in advanced technology, for E.g.- we have made considerable progress in space research (Chandrayaan- the moon mission), missile program, building sophisticated defense equipments, etc., on the other end, majority of our population (over 70%) struggles to get the most basic needs of life. Things like- clean air, clean drinking water, food, shelter, hygiene, education, etc. It is time that we focus or attention to innovate on the above topics which has an impact on the overall population and for long-term sustainability. There is an urgency to look into this situation and an obvious choice could be to get the public and private collaboration to grapple with this issue.
Another related point is, while many people think that most of these challenges are in rural setting, this is not true. The migration of people from the rural caused by poor employment opportunities in villages is affecting the urban setting. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that there are few job opportunities in the urban areas of India.

Is increasing the innovation capability good enough?

Companies spend a lot of money to increase the innovation capability of their staff, hoping thereby to get the competitive edge. Increasing the innovation capability of the organization is an important aspect, but it is not good enough for the company in terms of getting the competitive edge.

Having built the innovation capability, management needs to recognize the ideas which have higher potential to succeed and yield better returns among the other new ideas. Even recognizing is of not much use if the management cannot find ways to get these ideas implemented within a certain time and money.

Enlarging pipeline and creating aiming points a good innovation strategy

Enlarging the pipeline-by increasing the sheer volume of ideas-is only half the story. The simultaneous challenge is to enhance the pipeline by improving the quality of those ideas, not just the quantity.
Ideate around specific themes: Create ”aiming points” for innovation by focusing your ideation efforts on clearly defined corporate challenges, customer problems, or industry issues.
Appreciate comments and other ideas.

Limits of incrementalism

The hard reality is that “incrementalism” will no longer grow revenues by coming up with a slightly improved version of the same old thing and then selling it to the same old customers through the same old channels in the same old way.
An issue faced by many companies that were considered stable in the past. In the present context, find themselves stuck with no new ideas or products to grow the business.

What drives innovation anyway ?

Is it passionate individuals or the drive from senior management leading to innovation or corporate strategy or is it the external environment.

In my experience on this subject I have had the privilege of listening and reading materials by innovation experts. There are various views- 1. There needs to be passion in what we do. 2. Need for senior management to drive innovation. 3. Innovation to be part of the corporate strategy. 4. Then there are combinations for E.g- we need passionate individuals and organization support. 5. If an innvation success drives more innovation. 6. Then there are people saying that even the innovators kind of relax if there are no challenges from the external environment. Following this line the same say that when the “survival of the fittest” condition starts to set-in, it becomes inevitable that there is a natural tendency to innovate which further leads to actually doing well to find ways to survive by innovating. However in the end, only the best manage to live through for the next cycle.