Over the past five years, India has been displaying significant innovation growth, and this happy process could accelerate in the years ahead if the right ecosystem is continually built up. Patent publishing activity in the country during 2012-17 grew 10.8 percent in terms of compounded annual growth rate. Among Asian countries, India’s innovation growth rate was second only to China. What is more, because patents on innovations originating in India are being filed by Indian companies in different countries, this in turn is helping to raise the profile of Indian industry globally. This analysis of patent data by Clarivate Analytics from globally trusted scientific literature confirms positive trends brought out by other studies on the Indian innovation scene. In particular, sectors like computing, polymers & plastics, communications, pharmaceuticals, power engineering and automobiles — have recorded notable growth in innovation by Indian minds. Other key findings show that awareness about intellectual property has been growing across the country, Indian companies are filing almost equal number of patents compared to foreign ones, and many innovations are being based on cutting edge technologies like nanotechnology. How does India stack up against other countries on global scale in terms of innovation? As per latest Global Innovation Index (GII) ranking jointly developed by Cornell University, Paris-based business school Insead and World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), India weighs in at 57th position presently. Since India ranked 60th in 2017, this improvement is steady at most — in 2015 though, India ranked 81st. In comparison, China ranks 17th currently, while the top three innovative countries are Switzerland, Netherlands and Sweden, followed by Britain, Singapore and US. Considering that GII is made up of 80 indicators, experts see some positives for India. It is being acknowledged that India has been constantly outperforming on innovation relative to its level of development; in fact, it is being considered a leading innovator among low-middle income economies. The improvement is mainly noticeable in indicators like number of graduates in science and engineering, capital formation, higher expenditures on research and development, labour productivity and export of information and communication (ICT) technology. However, on indicators like political stability, overall education (including a lowly 104th notch on pupil-teacher ratio) and environmental performance, India has much catching up to do.

This calls for more synergy between government and industry to promote R&D and innovation, but how well is it coming about? There is much that needs to be done on this interface. The government has adopted a policy to finance start-ups, but real improvement can only come once private venture capital gets going to bankroll risk. As for companies, while some of them are investing more in R&D, what are still mostly lacking are long-term innovation strategy and proper human resource policy to find and nurture talented people. They need to be more flexible with organizational structure, so as to get the leadership as well as rank and file talk better and swear by innovation. Another GII indicator in which India needs to do well is ease of starting business, though the country has leapfrogged on this scale in the past couple of years by 53 notches to be perched at 77th rank presently. Internationally, the Government of India has been actively pursuing ‘innovation diplomacy’ — to forge cooperation with countries like Israel with strong and proven innovative prowess. A major part of such diplomacy is to set up bilateral innovation funds, which can particularly help Indian start-ups collaborate with foreign counterparts and thereby access global markets better. As for encouraging innovation at school level itself, the Central government in 2016 launched Atal Innovation Mission. Its objective is to promote an innovation culture among schoolchildren, to encourage them to think critically and creatively. This is sought to be done by providing them with hands-on experience in emerging areas like robotics, AI and 3D printing, as well as cultivate start-up incubation centres. An encouraging trend has been young entrepreneurs, fresh from prestigious institutes, founding startups and getting some support from government schemes and investor bodies. But these enterprises are mostly urban-based, and their challenge is to scale up. The vast possibilities in rural innovation still remain to be opened up, while our villages are crying out for cost-effective tech solutions to a host of problems. The biggest challenge is in the mind — how to view innovative ability not just as God-gifted, but something that can also be taught, acquired and nurtured to set game-changing rules for tomorrow.

Source: https://www.sentinelassam.com/news/fostering-innovation/