India innovates in abstract in a way no one else can : Navneet Bhushan, Crafitti Consulting
By P Chacko Joseph | October 5th, 2011 | 20 commentsExperts are divided over the prevalence of innovation in India. Some say that India lacks innovation and some point of innovations that is mushrooming like the low cost innovations in drinking water, automobiles, processes etc. We asked Navneet Bhushan, the founder director of CRAFITTI CONSULTING – an Innovation and Intellectual Property Consulting firm, about the state of innovation in India. For a decade from 1990 he worked as a Scientist in DRDO. Since 2000 he has worked in various Global and Indian companies and held various positions such as CEO, VP- Innovation, Principal Consultant and Technology Specialist. Navneet has authored more than 60 technical research papers and articles in various International and National Journals, Trade Magazines and Conferences. He has been an invited speaker in core technology forums, conferences and seminars and has been a regular contributor in national and international media on technology and business.
1) What is the scope of Innovation Management? How is the topic treated in India?
First of all – I think adding “management” to every function actually defocuses the meaning. We have seen terms like “knowledge management”. I would rather like to look at Innovation. In my view, a very useful definition of innovation is successful creation of change by (new) ideas. Now, as we know everything around us is changing – a rather fascinating dynamic. To survive and thrive in the changing world – one way is to adapt to the changes. However, a better method will be to create the change so as to make the whole world better. As Mahatma Gandhi said, you be the change that you want to see in the world. By creating the change, you help in Innovation – if the change is successful and is created through ideas. So in my opinion, the scope of Innovation is immense in the world which is impregnated with multitudes of opportunities and is rapidly evolving. Instead of “Innovation Management”, I would stress on “making innovation happen” should be more appropriate to discuss. India as a country is amazing in its complexity and ability to absorb change – India has absorbed vast amount of changes and adapted to the changing world through inherent strengths. Ability to adapt to the world and adopt the globe as one is summed up in our philosophy of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” – the whole world is one single family. However, time has come to advance this philosophy to creating change along with the global village. This is what is summed in our company’s philosophy as “Crafting Innovation Together”.
Please elaborate more on innovation in Business and Social space in India.
Navneet Bhushan
Another very peculiar situation in India when it comes to Innovation is almost low awareness of value of inventions and patents as a form of wealth creation for the companies. In fact, it has been an eye-opener for me. For the last 9 years I have been trying to make Indian companies aware of the strategic value of Patents in the Globalizing world and I have met with “that’s what lawyers do” to “we are a services company” to “let’s talk business, and not waste our time in this”. However, recently I have found the same companies who were ignoring patents and intellectual property in general are now opening up. However, they are still in infancy compared to the masters in the form of MNCs who own more of Indian Intellectual Property in the form of patents than Indian companies. This is in stark contrast to the developed nations.
In the short-term adaptability of Indians to tinker with the current systems to serve their short-term purpose is well known and in fact recognized as “Jugaad”. If you go to the root of the word in Hindi, it comes from “Yukti”, in Urdu its “tarkeeb” – a clever solution bordering on cunningness. I think, we are extremely good in solving short-term problems, working the system and wriggling in the overflowing traffic of Indian cities – we love to embrace and thrive in complexity. That’s our strength. However, when it comes to designing and inventing new, large, complex systems or products if you may, we have not shown a great level of output.
Finally India innovates in abstract in a way no one else can. The number of icons, the frameworks, the swami’s, the cults, the “way of life” methodologies, the “road to nirvana” mechanisms that India has created over many centuries, I do not think any other civilization has created. We are greatest exporters of “the abstract”. The strength of abstract actually becomes a weakness in a world that is about machines, the automatons, the robots and mass-scale production.
However, the new world that we are seeing now needs new ways to solve problems. The new age of innovation requires new methods to deal with complexity. They are likely to be based on a deeper understanding of indeterminacy, non-linearity, chaos, adaptation, self-organization and distributed intelligence. India scores naturally on all these – much better than any other country. However, we need to inculcate the new methods for a systemic change. We need to make India Innovative. In fact, that’s the only course left for the whole world as the largest population of youngest minds in the next 25 years will be based in India.
What are the challenges and barriers to innovation in India?
When I started working with executives, business leaders and even engineers and scientists, I realized that we do not have great evidence of inventive thinking or even innovation per se. I thought some more and I thought may be our professional colleges such as MBAs and Engineering and even other colleges do not have a mechanism of teaching MBA schools for last few years I already know that we need to take the LIST framework to the schools. Transforming the education system from school level upwards is the need. I think it should not be a patch-work. We really need Innovation schools. In this regard, Crafitti is looking for partners, to start Innovation schools – for the time being for those who have completed MBAs, existing professionals in companies and executives who have become middle managers and suddenly realize that they need to start something of their own. Despite the availability of many private colleges now, there is dearth of teaching Innovation and Entrepreneurship. We have created a 9 months programme to make employees of companies innovative, give meaning to non-employable engineers and MBA’s, and enable ventures of executives struck in the rut of a job.
Our country is a relatively young country in terms of gaining independence in the modern world. Last 60+ years of India – we have seen many ups and downs and survived and in fact thrived in the turbulent decades. Rapid globalization fueled by technological advancements has created huge opportunity for India. As I said earlier, India has this window of opportunity for next 25 years when the demographic dividend is ours to take.
This window, in my opinion, will be impacted by changes in the way our government and bureaucracy works. If they work in cohesion with the aspirations or the nation and the potential that India has, the world will become a better place to live. I think, the innovation in governance to facilitate innovation in every sector is the need. This requires genuine effort and change so that resources are vectored to attain the potential that India is showing. If this is achieved the barriers can be vaporized else we are back to stagnation.
What is your opinion on innovation in central, state, local government bodies and government run enterprises in India?
I started my career as a scientist in DRDO in 1990 and worked there till 2000. I must say, the level of problems that I worked on, the learning and the work that I did there, I haven’t seen in the private sector that I worked from 2000 to 2008. Having said that, all the good work, the motivation, the enthusiasm that a young scientist, engineer, or even a new employee comes up with in government run enterprises goes for a toss due to inherently slow nature of decision making and amazing focus on avoiding the work in the garb of avoiding the risks and paperwork.
Last three years we are trying to work with a very large R&D organization in Indian Government. They have been trying to set-up a new Intellectual Property Cell to streamline the system of Patenting and Inventions. The initial tender was to find a partner or a group of partners to make the IP Cell functional. The contract was to be for three years. As you can see, three years are over and yet we still have a situation where the organization has not been with any partners for three years. It is a colossal waste of time, effort, energy and money. In these three years, we have explained to the company on many of our methods for inventing and innovation, and we have got very nice feedback and results as well. Yet, the organization is not able to decide on starting the work. In a private company, this sort of delay is absolutely shocking.
I think Government of India needs to open its doors, windows and needs to the thriving industry and even startups. This requires a fundamental mind-set change. There are many public-private partnership initiatives yet results are far off. The reason is – continuous focus on evaluating the work and not creating the change. The objectives of “Babus” need to shift to become facilitators rather than controllers.
Role of Crafitti Consulting in innovation space.
Crafitti is an Innovation research, consulting and training company. We work in Business, Science and Technology space and with start-ups, government organizations and private companies. When we started in June 2008, we had these frameworks, techniques and methodologies that we had experimented in our earlier work in solving complex problems in multiple contexts – one can see the variety of strategic decision making problems described in my book Strategic Decision Making – Applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process, Springer, 2004. These techniques we have applied and seen Innovation as a form of graffiti in its serendipitous form. However, we have these techniques and frameworks that can craft the graffiti in its organized form. We have used this approach in a unique mechanism to work with multiple companies and organizations to create the next generation solutions. For example, we have worked with consumer electronics giant in generating patentable ideas for next mobile devices, consumer-care company for generating next class of shampoos, an automotive company for solving key problems in their existing designs and generating next generation break systems, an oil refining company to generate ideas for increasing the yield of LPG in refinery process, etc. Currently we are working with an SME to improve the productivity of sweet corn production and an education company to design a new way to create a learning system.
Our mechanism of working with different fields is what we call the method of co-crafting. We bring our methods and frameworks and work with domain experts in the field to solve problems, to invent systems, generate new patents, invent around blocking patents and create new concepts. In this regard, many times, we create new methods and solutions. It is interesting to note how we created India’s first online patent citation analysis product to find out relative value of any patent. It is called socialcitnet. We also are partnering with a Gene analysis company – GDI-India, to work on creating solutions against medical threats that cities and countries are increasingly going to face. In this regard, we are creating a television series on crisis and disaster management. Our Innovation co-crafting interventions have already created results such as 80 patentable inventions in 4 months through 7 projects, 30+ patentable inventions in 2 months through 3 projects, etc. These are real numbers and real innovation results.
With our offices now in Bangalore, Mumbai and Chennai, we are gearing up to creating India wide presence as our aim is to make India innovative by 2020. I think that’s the only way the world can thrive and may be survive. It’s a mission that we have and we know the only way we can do this is by crafting innovation together and empowering ideas together. We look forward to long term synergy with all the minds that can work with us.
A great article on Innovation, which is a need of hour .
Thank you Venu Kapoor
Dear navneet your thoughts on way to think and innovation is excellent. i wish to add some thoughts in this direction.
Innovation occurs in the space of freedom of mind.freedom comes from clarity of mind and purpose and goals set forth by the induvidual or the organisation. this needs vision and the induvidual’s realisation of the goal or purposeof life. . Unless human mind evolves to this state of conciousness,(Shedding the body conciouness), creativeness is hampered. Bussiness to be drivven by a motto of service to human kind and not by aiming at quickly aquiring material benefits alone(Ehical aspects play a great role for long term sustainability).. this process of evolving through experimentation is certainly happening in indian bussiness leaders and society at large,but through a passage of choies.
let me congradulate you on your rich thoughts.
hvsrao
Dear Dr Rao,
Thank you for your comments
I agree – freedom of mind and may be freedom from mind – if one has to first find the self – is a necessary condition for systematic systemic change. And change inside is the starting point to changing the world.
Thanks once again for your guidance,
with warm regards
Navneet
Innovations is required in every aspect of our life. Sometimes we think why cannot mobile phones be charged by solar energy? Why cannot the system of housing be changed ?Why cannot building be more eco friendly with water recycing, manure plant with biowaste and bio gas for common lights ? Why cannot gym equipments be used to produce electicity etc ? Why cannot companies have a residential area with amneties near thier workplace to improve traffic conditions? And much more things. Definetely your efforts towards education should spread more and reach at school level too. Feels good to see people like you are attempting to bring innovations in India.
Thank you Sangita,
For your comments. We look forward to work with like minded people to create the change that all of us wish to see in India.
My answers to all why can not above … are yes we should – systematically we should start exploring all why cant questions and start how we can – move to how I can and then actually start doing it Please also look at the Innovation S Curve on my blog http://innovationcrafting.blogspot.com/2008/03/innovation-s-curve.html
An excellent article , and well thought out . Also backed by action and an effort to change things . I will be happy to help in any way I can , through BestPracsClub of where I serve as a Director . This can help both organisations that have similar aims
Thank You Dr Vieira,
Great to connect with you. We look forward to long term synergy ahead.
with warm regards
Navneet
The innovation potential is really big in India. The only thing is that our system has to be streamlined for the benefit of the country. Your vision as well as the current initiative is really great in this regard. We have talents; the main thing is that we have to spread awareness to open the minds and see in the right direction. Such initiative has to spread across India. I believe that if your kind of initiative gains momentum, the face of this country may change in a big way!
Innovation can go in many directions, once it becomes a part of our thought processes. Indian organizations need to accept and encourage innovation at every levels of development activities and try to build strong intellectual property portfolios. Hope Crafitti Consulting can make it happen in India now.
Thanks Nilutpal,
We at Crafitti sincerely believe that it is a mission that all of us together have to undertake and we are seeing ” the change that we wanted to see” and all is by continuously doing. I agree with your point about Innovation Potential of India – it is tremendous. The systemic change need to be at the mindset level at first – then of course we start building on it,
Thanks for your comments – we look forward to crafting innovation together
A schooling system that teaches conformance, a college+university system which revels in sub-par quality of paper and research, a work ethos that punishes risk-taking, a society that celebrates hierarchy, …. these have to be dismantled for us to be truly innovative.
Indians who have succeeded in innovating have done so despite all these, and naturally, deserve all of our praise and appreciation. They have done so because they subscribed to excellence in the work they do, of the pride they took in their sense of perfection, and an unstinting devotion to changing lives around them.
Now, that’s like climbing the Everest without Oxygen. Sure, a few can do it. But dismantle the system that shackles us, and it will be the much needed Oxygen cylinder on the backs of several more climbers. Many, many more will now be able to climb that Innovation Peak.
Sundar – great to hear from you.
Excellent metaphor – unshackling the shackles imposed by schooling/education system as the much needed oxygen. Great.
One possibility – till we reach to that level is may be to start at changing the system that already has produced – by giving them whiff of fresh air for some time – a few cylinders of pure clean oxygen – for few more smaller mountains – on their way to their respective Everests – We thought about it and actually are about to actionize a small change – A 3 Trimester post Bachelors or working professionals course for creating your own – venture, idea, company or may be a new computer game http://innovationcrafting.blogspot.com/2011/10/creating-innovation-professionals-9.html ~
However, to create an environment when we can proudly say “into that heaven of freedom, let me country awake” ~ quoting Tagore ~ and giving a system ~ “where the Mind is free” – as pointed out by Dr Rao in the above comments ~ we have a systemic journey to undertake ~ I sincerely believe its a journey all of us have to take – we somehow have to create oxygen
with warm regards
Navneet
Hi Navneet, It is indeed nice to note the points on innovation schools.. Another point that we need to work on, as the normal Indians, leaving the advertising professionals aside, is in innovative communication. I have seen so many people who bring about innovative ways of doing things, but lack self-confidence and good communication skills to bring forth their ideas with pen, brush and tongue – and hence sometimes give a picture that our culture is not very innovative.
Wish Crafitti many more successes in the years to come!
Warm regards, Suresh
Hello sir, As you said [ the in my opinion the greatest weakness of Indian businesses has been found in creating new customer value. For this one need to understand the customer need – not by asking them, but understanding the need. Second level is to look at the way solutions that fulfill current needs can be evolved or changed to new ways of fulfilling customer needs. And, deeper one goes in understanding the customer need and way to fulfill those needs, more likely it will be to discover the next.],
i remember steve jobs, bz i think he never asked any customer whats their needs or wants, he made it by thinking in many dimensions and understanding a lot, adapting technology, result is big hit on his all created products,
its a good article and we can understand lot more things by this.
Thank you Sir,
Paramesh
Hi Suresh,
I agree. How to communicate what you are doing – in a simple. clear, concise way – so that it goes to the public at large – specifically I have seen the written communication is very weak. And may be it can be attributed to our ancient system of communication based on “Shruti” – ‘shloka” ~ generations passed on the knowledge in shloka to next ones and so on.
Hi Paramesh,
Thanks. I definitely am not saying never ask the customer. However, the need of the customer may not be known many times to the customer and hence there has to be mechanism to go deeper in understanding the need. Also, sometimes there may not be any need, but the very act of bringing something new creates the need.
Thanks for your comments
Navneet
Great to connect with you Navneet through this channel.
Excellent interview and article. Kudos to Crafitti and Frontier India on bringing this to the online world.
As part of CIBER’s Practical Innovation team, I support fostering Innovation to help CIBER and its clients globally.
It was a pleasure to meet Navneet earlier in India to discuss on the same topic, where he brings in thought leadership and practical ways to innovate.
Looking forward to innovate together Navneet. All the best to Crafitti’s Innovative future
It has become a fashion for managers to innovate every single product and process. I agree with Navneet for his statement that involvement of management to terms like innovation or knowledge infact defocusses their meaning. We are interested in nurturing innovation to create robust and enforceable inventions. We have now realized that this kind of activity is beyond the comprehension of a legal team, an IP team and least of all a management team. While trying to attain the above, our second focus is on enhancing patent filing. We are in constant touch with Navneet to attain the above objectives.
Dear Navneet
Excellent Interview.
Its time Innovation is getting focus, what it deserves.
This is becoming the mail differentiators between various organization.
Best Wishes
Ajit Agrawal
Dear Mr. Ekam, Dr. Kashyap, Mr. Agrawal,
Thank you for your comments.
It indeed was a joy to meet you EK and CIber team. My apologies for the delay in responding ~ I will be sending you a reply on the lines that we discuss and indeed it will be Crafitti’s joy to work and contribute to Ciber Innovation Journey.
Thank you Dr Kashyap, We have to be in continuous learning mode – that I think is the mechanism of innovation.
Yes Mr. Agrawal – from the hype of Innovation – we are now getting into to doing innovation rather than just lip-servicing on Innovation by top managers ~
I must also thank frontier India and Joseph in particular for publishing this interview – it indeed is an interesting platform for us to work together!
with warm regards
Navneet
Hi Navneet Sir,
Excellent & really visionary thoughts on how India can become a innovation powerhouse.Loved it!!
I think one of the primary requisites here would be generating awareness in this direction and then building ecosystems through which we can deeply ingrain innovation in Indian social fabric, just as Japanese have in them to be really efficient . These will be the key for a long term change to happen, just as the love for cricket the love for innovation needs to happen. The DNA for innovation, as rightly mentioned by you as “Jugaad “, is already present all we require is to nurture it through the concept of ‘Innovation Schools’ forwarded by you. At present we are in a desperate need for overhauling of our education systems where the concept of developing “thinking skills” needs a firm place in syllabuses.
Considering the present macroeconomic & political situation globally, I think ‘Innovation’ cutting across every field can only be the key for building a thriving & self dependent economy.