Why India Must Innovate?
Posted : June 30, 2006 at 10:43 pm [IST]
The future of a nation today depends on its innovative power. And it must cover every business process activity. Basically, a new culture must develop where the innovational attitude work must be taught right from school stage.
1985 ‘Plaza Accord’ revalued the yen (and the West German deutsche mark) and let it appreciate against the dollar making Japanese exports uncompetitive, grievously affecting its manufacturing industry. For a country that depended on manufacturing exports, this was a cruel blow. But, the Japanese could go right ahead and sold more cars in the US in the next few years than they ever did. ‘Squeeze the dry towel’ became the slogan of the day across manufacturing companies in Japan. And even today, in manufacturing none excels Japanese in high-end manufacturing.
India has also innovated best when it faced the situation where there was no alternative. In the 1980s, when US refused supercomputers for weather forecasting India wanted, the National Aerospace Laboratory in Bangalore developed an alternative technology, which forced Cray Research of the US to negotiate with the meteorological department for the supercomputer it wanted.
Tata Motors conceived the Ace, a one-tonne truck capable of operating on the narrow roads of rural India, when its mainstay heavy vehicle business was in the grip of a slowdown and a lot of money was going into the ‘Indica’ project. Perhaps Tata Motors today is working on its best innovation that will be rs1-lkh car for the entry level. The whole of manufacturing world is waiting for it.
According to Vijay Govindarajan, Earl C. Daum professor of international business at the Tuck School of Business (US), some of the greatest innovations from Indian companies in the last five years are
ITC’s e-choupal has transformed the rural sector by helping farmers increase farm productivity and get better prices
Narayana Hrudayalaya provides world-class bypass surgery for $1,500 by re-engineering the healthcare value chain.
Tata Motors has designed, engineered and manufactured a high-quality automobile, Indica, cost competitively using 100 per cent indigenous resources
ICICI Bank has changed the financial services industry with Internet banking and electronic payment systems.
Brazil is a good example of how nations innovate. When it was hit by oil shocks in the 1970s, it used its extensive sugarcane crop to manufacture ethanol, an alternative fuel. By the mid-1980s, almost every new car in Brazil was running on ethanol blend. Today, ethanol still accounts for 40 per cent of its fuel consumption. Despite similar problems, India hasn’t done much on this front. Realizing the necessity, some IITs have tie-ups with either industry or venture capitalists, the projects are hardly significant if we look at the scale of the more developed economies. The universities in the US earn around a billion dollars through licenses every year.
According to its science and technology department, China will burn $111.8 billion on R&D by 2020; that’s 2.5 per cent of its GDP. In comparison, India targets taking its R&D spend to 3 per cent of its GDP by this year. Right now it stands hardly at 1.1 per cent.
If India is to be counted amongst the great powers tomorrow, innovation needs to be a constant process, not just a response to a dire situation.
PS
Innovation in India by Vivek Paul
A quick guide to a wealth of useful information on innovation.
Erehwon Innovation Consulting is an innovation consulting firm based in India and Singapore. www.erehwonconsulting.com
Innovation for India - Marico Foundation has instituted the Innovation for India Awards. www.innovation4india.org
National Innovation Foundation provides institutional support to grassroots green innovations. www.nifindia.org
SRISTI (Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions) and the Honey Bee Network track innovations at the grassroot level. Honey Bee puts people with grassroot innovations in touch with other villages who could use their ideas. It has a database of more than 51,000 traditional grassroot innovations. www.sristi.org and www.sristi.org/honeybee.html
GIAN (Grassroots Innovations Augmentation Network) scales up innovation from the Honey Bee database through value additions. www.gian.org
- Indra
Category: Manufacturing |
2 Comments »
First, Brazils “innovation” was not innovation at all. It forced the entire economy to use a more expensive fuel source at tax payers expense. In the end, Brazil got saved not by it’s “innovation” but by US debt.
Please understand that the US economy has too much debt and the US central bank tried to water down the value of the US dollar with the hope of easing this debt burden. While it didn’t help with the debt burden, it certainly did make dollar denominated oil much more expensive causing alternate and national fuels to be much more attractive.
Second, if you really want innovation, then what you want is to kill copyrights and patents and keep government out. Copyrights and patents choke off and fense off innovation. The USA can get away with this “choking” because they have a huge university system that was designed to compensate for these failures, and a huge amount of economic freedoms that allow for alternate opportunities. Other countries have no such luxury and it terrifies me to see them try to copy the US patent and copyright system wile not having anything to offset the damage. It frightenes me that so many people don’t understand how dangerous copyrights and patents are for most countries.
Posted by: David C at July 6, 2006 @ 3:56 am
good
Posted by: vijayshankar choudhhury at October 9, 2006 @ 12:03 am
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