There is a lot of buzz about India having carved a niche as a global innovator of high tech services. If we are serious about achieving rapid inclusive growth and bringing about economic and social transformation, we need to aggressively harness our National Innovation Potential. Innovation and R&D can become the focus of India’s growth story. Ad hoc improvisation or ‘Jugaad’ has always been a part of the Indian ethos and has brought many benefits- be it sustainable energy from waste, a reasonably priced refrigerator or affordable solar power solutions in rural India, these are making way for sustained innovation. The big question is if India is at the cusp of global innovation, what can we do to unleash this vast potential to innovate from India, for India and for the world?

Innovation is not only about being creative but also about being relevant at a global scale. It is important to embrace new and innovative techniques to achieve speed, scale and replicability, thus helping to capitalise on global market transitions by incubating new technologies.

To drive sustained innovation, we need to kindle the innovation spirit and foster an innovation life cycle. There are four specific approaches that can help:

Need for public private partnerships

The U.S. Federal Government is creating the National Infrastructure Foundation - a nimble, collaborative strategic intervention organization that will house innovations programs from fragmented silos.

It will partner equally with government agencies, universities, venture capitalists, and corporations, creating innovation performance metrics and supporting innovative economic development initiatives, in regional clusters.

As another example, Israel has the highest number of high-tech start ups and is fast becoming the Second Silicon Valley or ‘Start up nation’. In the 1990s, the Israel government invested in excess of $100M into a venture capital vision called Yozma – which successfully seeded the innovation and startup economy in the country. This program brought together the Israel Ministry of Science and the industry to support exponential growth of hi-tech ventures in the country.

This is a great model for India also, given the focus of our country on infrastructure development and global competitiveness public private partnership can develop macro-economic environments that will foster innovation - in lock-step with the country’s premier educational institutions and venture capitalists.

Technology and Products

Technology has redefined the way we learn, live, work and play, bringing about a paradigm shift in the way people and companies conduct their business, facilitate communication among stakeholders and conduct R&D. Through the internet, cloud infrastructure, mobility and collaboration tools, social networking, and video have positively enhanced everyday lives of billions of people across the globe. Technology has impacted education, healthcare, news and entertainment, commerce, finance, physical safety and security, and also building infrastructure.

The drivers of technological change are not to be found in individual companies, venture capitalists or research institutes alone, but from broader firms such as universities, knowledge institutes, and industry forums. The energy of entrepreneurism and unconditional encouragement to take risks, makes it is easy to come up with that visionary game changing ideas which are globally relevant.

Expand the spectrum of innovation

In the brave new world of innovators, it is important to rethink business models for alliance and establishing ecosystems. The guiding tenet for achieving this is customer centricity. In Cisco, switching and routing may have seemed like unlikely partners with electric utility companies – but by applying the intelligence of networking technology to electric grids, it was possible to better manage, monitor and distribute energy, optimize power delivery, reduce consumption, increase sustainability and ultimately benefit the environment.

This out of the box thinking allowed us to work in new ways with new partners to crack new markets. With new relationships, it is also important to ensure that all can derive value and establish working models beyond traditional methods. This gives rise to sophisticated cross functional ecosystems to tackle most dynamic markets and customer requirements – while fending off emerging competitive threats. This requires a new type of adaptable organization - nimble, strategic, customer focused, and able to connect dots inside the company and across multiple partners.

Culture of Innovation

India has the advantage of a youthful population with 65% below 35, strong engineering talent, and a partner-friendly government. There are giant opportunities if we create a conducive environment to excite this segment to take risks, be creative, focus on research based innovation and implement quality new ideas for growth and progress.

Thanks to the internet, and the knowledge available, we are at an exciting cusp – we need to focus on an enabling culture and mindset that will encourage our youth to go forth and conquer! Fear of failure creates a risk averse mindset that can prevent them from making bold initiatives towards pioneering successful innovations.

In companies, this is done in multiple ways – right from creating a great workplace environment with all necessary infrastructure, tools and capabilities aimed to fostering innovations, towards making workplaces a living lab! In conjunction, it is important to create rewarding programs focused on teams and individuals to fuel growth in new markets or redefine current markets. Equal credit should be given to people for ensuring transparency and contributing to open source community in line with the principles of global industry collaboration.

And a wrapper to this is the motivation for excellence. Any kind of innovation coming from the different parts of the environment needs to have equal focus on being globally relevant and quality conscious! Having set ourselves up to drive a steady pipeline of innovation excellence we have to ensure that our quality creations have the long term goal of Innovating from India for India and for the World!

(The author is India Site Leader, Cisco)

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