India all set to become the center of innovation
By Binu Paul, SiliconIndia   |   Friday, 15 April 2011, 14:04 IST   |    23 Comments
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India all set to become the center of innovation
Bangalore:Innovation has not been the forte of Indians as we often turned to the West for everything, be it a new technology, culture, literature, art, theater, or movies. But as time has gone bye, India has become a hub of innovation with increased quality education and reverse brain drain contributing to this paradigm shift. The Indian society especially the corporate world has gradually recognized that innovation is an instrument of empowerment and change. It was reported that despite the ever-ending talk about innovation among CEOs in the U.S., more than half of the most innovative companies in the world came from Asia and Europe in 2010, most of them are from the BRIC - China, India and Brazil - countries. Indian prominence in innovation at the world stage can no longer be hidden. Almost every Apple product runs on Indian software. You are most likely to do your online shopping through an Infosys built platform somewhere in India. Localized innovation - where products are developed in emerging markets for emerging markets - have been pretty strong in India. Today we have grown up to a level where our innovations created for emerging markets are being globalised. And with a huge "talent pool" available at a low cost, India is definitely on its way to becoming an innovation hub which will provide research and development platform to global giants. Indian startups and companies thus began to get major funding from different sources for their innovative abilities. The Department of Science and Technology finally set up the National Innovation Foundation (NIF) - India on Feb 28th 2000 with an aim of providing institutional support in scouting, spawning, sustaining and scaling up grassroots green innovations and helping their transition to self supporting activities. Recognizing the need of the hour, the Prime Minister and the President had declared the current decade declared as a 'decade of innovation' that signifies a transformative phase of India's destiny. It's a sad but true fact that the promising innovations by the young Indians not adequately really paid off or encouraged. Statistics shows that in 2010, only 12 to 14 percent (35) of innovations out of 250 were approved and were given patent. However, it's a disturbing fact and a serious question that we hate to acknowledge and answer - Around six lakh students graduate from technical institutes every year in our country and why that none of their 'innovative' project works are not considered worthy of a patent? We also need to find out the actual reason for the low number of innovations and should address it to stay alive in the technologically competitive world.

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