Innovation is such a universally exciting and wonderfully sexy thing that, perhaps, a new age Kama Sutra should be written on it. A sort of compendium of techniques, methods and ‘postures’ for sustained performance or instant creative orgasm, as the case may be... I tell you the world needs it and needs it more than Viagra because when it comes to innovation, getting it ‘up’ is a lesser problem than to make it ‘running’.
And who can teach innovation better than the Indians? Never mind the constant laments of intellectuals like Pavan K Verma and many others who in their pseudo-erudism (my term, erudite+urbanism) just love to doubt our innovative jeans (or is it genes?). The reasons why we as people are so innovative are plenty and obvious. But I am a man of fundamentals…
The first key driver of innovation is necessity. Isn’t it obvious that we Indians are the most experienced and qualified in the area of necessity? After all, we spend our lives bothering about necessities. Everything across the five levels of Maslow’s hierarchy is a perpetual necessity and that too, all at once (that’s something even Maslow would have found hard to grasp!). Example : a gum chewing ipod wielding girl wearing a low cut jeans and spaghetti top giving alms to a beggar, while at the same time avoiding to get raped by other beggars, on her way to the temple! How much necessity is that in one mundane act of living?
Nothing that’s necessary to live can be taken as given in this country. Rather, it is given that everything has to be taken through ever handy imagination and resourcefulness… Which is what makes us so incredibly innovative!
The second key driver of innovation is thinking out of the box. And this is where we Indians are specially endowed. Our ancient culture and our immense religion, not to mention our karmic / genetic causal ontological reality (?&%#$@!?) has made us superbly poised for innovation. You see, thinking out of the box presupposes a box! We as people have never been boxed-in. We are free body and souls which, by the way, is possible only in India. We do not operate in structures and we naturally rebel against rules. We believe, to somewhat borrow Khalil Gibran’s words, that law is a cage in which the bird of our true nature can open its wings but it cannot fly. But we are free birds… free to piss and shit anywhere we want, free to chirp and quack any nonsense to anyone, free to nest anywhere (why do you call it encroachment, idiot)
You still don’t get it, you moron? When nothing is structured and everything is an amorphous soup in one endless ambiguity, nothing can be anticipated, predicted or repeated with any degree of certainty. Every act of living then, by definition, becomes innovative. You may take the same route to office everyday but you still need to be innovative because every day there is a new traffic jam at a new place on the route and for a new reason (or no reason). If we, who live in and thrive on so much of new and unexplored every breath of our lives, are not innovative, who on Earth will be?
In fact, we have mastered this innovation thing so much that this is now institutionalized and ingrained into our kids from the beginning. Just a small (but poignant) example of this is that every government when it comes to power, innovates and can come up with its own version of History to be taught to kids. So much so that by the time a kid passes school, he/she has learnt a beautiful lesson that history is fluid and pliable (much in line with our day to day living unstructured ambiguity) and that each of us has a right, neigh obligation, to create his own innovative version. Consequently, no other country can boast of so many people holding so many innovative yet equally accepted versions of their shared history!
Which brings me to this important conversation these days about need to fund innovation in India. Forceful suggestions are being made on how current funding climate is un-encouraging of and insufficient for innovations we need. I for one do not agree with it. There are big time success stories which no one is acknowledging. See how Niira Radia’s innovations in liaison and lobbying model got funded… Or how A Raja and Shahid Balwa innovated on capital and debt structuring models… I am sure this may have been difficult in any other country. (BTW, the simultaneous use of ‘sure’ and ‘may’ in previous sentence is a proud Indian expression of ambivalence much needed to capture the overall essence / subtle context of innovation).
Still naysayers are saying that sufficient funding is not being done. Some people are just eternally and morbidly pessimists! I know one innovative product concept which was already successful in Europe, Americas and SE Asia and which was courageously introduced in India with such ingenuity that it got funding instantly. Another poignant example is of these good Samaritans who, inspired by Kapil Sibal, have started a K12 school with a ‘USP’ and ‘innovation’ derived out of a clever merging of some latest Ivy league research and some traditional Indian gurukul parampara. They got funded in a jiffy. Why, we have recently funded an innovative chain of women beauty parlors making serious contributions to women self-esteem and empowerment and riding on the subtle yet profound insight that most men under estimate the monthly parlor expenses of their partners! How much more innovation funding do you need?
But I agree on one thing. In a country where everyone is innovating every living breath (as I discussed and sealed previously), it is not possible to fund all innovations. Then there are freaks and idiots there. You got to draw a line somewhere after all.
Let me give you another example. I can say without any modesty and compunction that I have some expertise on innovation, funding and related issues. So what if it does not reflect in my company’s business numbers. After all what has expertise got to do with producing results? Anyways… Only last week I had this guy came to me through a friend’s reference asking for some advice. A seemingly nice and intelligent guy but such a disappointment.
For good 45 minutes he talked about his innovation. But more than the innovation, he kept digressing to social impact, making a difference and similar nonsense. It seemed the dude had landed straight from Mars. I mean, for all the education and fancy degrees, how could he be so naïve? He kept talking about innovative ways to feed hungry, innovative ways of teaching poor, bottom of the pyramid, blah blah blah! That’s no innovation. That’s bloody Mother Teresa!
Bottom line is that from Raja to Reliance, from Balwa to Bharti and from Telgi to Tata, true innovation is innovation to make money. Even the Prahlad guy who talked about bottom of pyramid, being true to the last worn out hems of his Indian jeans, was firmly focused about making money there. No more, no less. Period. And for such innovations (and there plenty in India at the moment) no funds and no resources are a constraint. Lord Kuber himself sees to it!
As for the rest (like my friend’s reference above), bundle them up and put them into a jail. For as they say in Hindi – one fish spoils the whole pond!
