INDIA INNOVATION 101
What is Innovation?
Excerpted from India’s Innovation Path
Published in 2012 by the Center for Knowledge Societies in New Delhi
Copyright 2012 Aditya Dev Sood
All rights reserved by the author
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Additional copies ofthis book may be requested by emailing cks@cks.in.
Perhaps there is no one term or concept that has so fully captured the
contemporary imagination in India as the word innovation. It therefore also
follows that different people mean subtly varying things by this term, which then
floats along contemporary discourse on the wings of loose and variable
signification. My intention in writing about innovation in India is not merely
to fix its meaning, once and for all, nor is it only to understand and speak to
these different ways in which the term is being used. I would also suggest that a
particular way of thinking about innovation may be better than other ways, and
that such a way might serve larger collective and public interests of people in this
region and in other similar regions of the world.
The term innovation is derived from the Latin root nova, new. It means, therefore,
to bring something new into the world, which changes the way people live, work,
interact with one another. But the world is always changing, never the same, and
so there must be something memorable about this newness, which allows it to be
valued, noted, remembered, preserved. An innovation must be a kind of newness
which is useful or beneficial in some way, such that it be celebrated in newspapers,
protected through patents and registrations, distributed quickly and efficiently to
the largest numbers of people for their benefit and to bring about general welfare
and the public good.
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© Center for Knowledge Societies
The Indian government recently identified the decade 2010 - 20 as India’s
‘Decade of Innovation.’ One observes steadily growing investments in R&D
across the country, the setting up of national and state innovation bodies, as well
as the introduction of government-sponsored innovation funds. There have also
been several conferences and debates on innovation and how to best promote
and accomplish it in India, and a number of articles on the subject, written for
newspapers and magazines, as well as more informal platforms like online forums
and blogs. Despite these longer-term trends, I also often encounter a tremendous
amount of uncertainty and confusion about this term, as well as some anxiety
that although one should be involved with innovation, one’s place of work or
business does not, in fact, allow such activities to actually be undertaken.
Innovation is also sometimes understood as a kind of cognitive leap that cannot
be predicted or controlled, much like Archimedes’ famous Eureka! moment. One
of my main goals in writing this account of innovation in India is to show how
forms of innovation have in fact grown more and more systematic and complex
over time, and that this process has a characteristic shape and contour in a
country such as India.
Permit me an analogy to explain my case. One hears, from those who study these
things, that agriculture came about more or less by accident. Our early ancestors
found fruits and berries, corn, edible plants and other vegetation and ate the good
parts, discarding the seeds without thought, here and there, or in the garbage. In
other cases they ate the seeds, which passed through them to find themselves in
newly fertilized ground. In this early period, one would have to conclude,
agriculture was not yet routinized, its science was not well established, and it was
not a predictably reliable means for creating socio-economic value, even though
it came to be later on. In much the same way, even though innovation is being
practiced in scattered and unorganized ways around us, we are still in a very
preliminary phase of being able to actually understand what is going on, how
exactly it yields us benefit, and what parts of the process are critical to its success
in different social contexts, sectors of industry and world cultures.
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Innovation, Capitalism, Industrialism
Without actually using the term innovation, Joseph Schumpeter provided the
classical framework for thinking about innovation in economic and productive
terms. He wrote that “the function of entrepreneurs is to reform or
revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention, or more
generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity
or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of
materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on.”
Capitalism, for Schumpeter, is driven incessantly forward through the destruction
of older forms of value creation at the hands of new forms, which will in turn be
replaced by other newer ones in time. Novelty and a concept of forward
movement in time are therefore intrinsic to Schumpeter’s conception of how
capitalism works. He calls this process ‘creative-destruction,’ a concept he
evidently derived from German Indological readings of Sanskrit texts,
particularly Saiva theology, which offers up the concept of adi-anta, the
simultaneous beginning and end of things and the forward movement of time
on account of this process.
Schumpeter listed several different kinds of changes that could be brought about
through entrepreneurial activity. These included the discovery and creation of
new markets, the development of new methods of production and distribution,
as well as new forms of industrial organization, and new kinds of consumer
goods. All these different kinds of entrepreneurial activity require creative
thinking, resourcefulness, planning, forethought and continuous compensatory
action. In other words, they require that specifically human ability for
intentional social or material change, a faculty which we may also call ‘design.’
However, of all the different dimensions of entrepreneurship identified by
Schumpeter, there is one, which seems to have a greater impact on our collective
consciousness, which seems to shape culture, and which may in fact create
greater value than all the others. This is the last area of innovation listed above,
the creation of new kinds of consumer goods. For in creating a consumer good,
one is also already creating new kinds of experiences, new propositions about
how to experience and live in the world, and one may be instantiating and
imbuing into a product or service new ideologies about what is good and
valuable. There is therefore, a larger role for design in this particular area of
innovation, which necessarily encompasses the different ways in which a
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Innovation in an Emerging Economy
The key challenge for India and for many other similar regions of the world is
that for both better and worse they have had no deep and sustained experience
with industrialization. For this reason they were, until very recently, described as
‘industrially underdeveloped,’ and then ‘developing’ countries. In the postsocialist era, we have seen the term ‘emerging market economy’ to be used to
identify those nations among these, which adopted market-friendly policies and
showed corresponding growth in national income and productivity. By the late
1980s, many of these regions were still largely agricultural economies, although
they were beginning to adopt terrestrial and then satellite television networks.
Beginning in the late 1990s and then accelerating through the last decade,
however, many parts of Asia and Africa began sprouting cellular communications
towers that connected their citizens through increasingly swift mobile networks,
providing them sophisticated voice as well as data connectivity. From the point
of view of their dominant modes of production, therefore, one might characterize
them as ‘agricultural-informational societies.’
Alternatively, I would like to propose that we flip our terms and definitions
around and recognize that all those regions of the world that are called emerging
economies are also those which have experienced an explosion of media,
communications and informational networks, despite limited or partial
industrialization. That is to say, what an emerging economy is, by this definition,
is a region of the world experiencing infromationalization without a great deal of
industrialization preceding it. India, China, Indonesia, Egypt, South Africa and
Brazil are all imperfect examples of this paradigm, but note how starkly they
contrast with Iran, Iraq, Russia, Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. In the latter group,
the reverse process has taken hold and they are industrializing — through
extractive industries — while limiting or controlling informationalization.
product or service is experienced, including its very brand, identity, packaging,
color, finish and materiality, form, user experience, all of which come to bear
cumulatively on the underlying technology and platforms through which it
may be delivered.
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How can and should an Emerging Economy approach the challenge and
possibility of innovation? This is the significant question to which no compelling
answers have yet been seen. There are, of course, some precedents, in particular,
Joseph Schumacher’s idiosyncratic but oracular arguments that the approach to
technology necessary for developing countries is different from that pursued in
Europe, almost from the time that Adam Smith studied efficiency gains due to
the systematization of labor in a needle-making factory, or Charles
Babbage observed that an array of minute mechanical improvements in industrial
manufacturing was vastly reducing the human effort and labor necessary for the
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creation of the same kind of finished good. Schumacher argued that such radical
reductions in the need for human labor were actually hurting the economies and
societies of Asia, and that another approach to technology, which he first called
‘intermediate’ and later called ‘appropriate’ was necessary. This might offer light
electrification and mechanization, but would still involve significant levels of
semi-skilled artisanal or tradesman labor.
The great value of Schumacher’s intervention is that he was actually thinking
about how technology and society could or should interact with one another,
particularly in the non-industrialized nations of the world. One of his other big
ideas, that economic policy should be directed towards the happiness of the larger
numbers of society rather than merely towards the expansion of their productivity,
has also proved resilient and has been resuscitated in various ways in more recent
times. But in Schumacher’s times, just a generation ago, no one was preoccupied
with the question of innovation, and so his writings do not really speak to how
different approaches can lead to an acceleration of benefits deriving from
innovation, either to consumers and other members of society. That is the larger
purpose of the current work.
But there is another arc to this story, which may even be the more important
one: the founding and creation of an enterprize on the basis of a foundational
innovation. While this approach emerged organically in Silicon Valley over the
second half of the twentieth century, its possibility may have been anticipated by
Joseph Engelberger, the noted engineer and theorist who thought of innovation
in more technical and technological terms. He famously reduced innovation to a
question of well-defined need, a working group with the relevant technical
competencies, and the requisite financial resources to support them. In some
sense, Engelberger had already theorized the key elements of today’s globalizing
venture capital networks, who are similarly looking to identify the right ‘team,
dream and machine,’ which might therefore command venture funding
investments.
For most people alive today, it would be obvious that our lives and experiences
have been dramatically shaped by technologies, services, and new kinds of
consumer goods that could not have even been imagined just a few years before
they came about. Those goods have been widely adopted, those who
conceptualized or distributed or otherwise supported them have grown more
wealthy, and those who had invested in their companies have also prospered. But
Taming the Fire of Innovation
Peter F. Drucker, the famed management theorist from the latter part of the
last century, was the first to argue that innovation must be viewed as a form of
organized, systematic and rational work. He understood that innovation involved
both perceptual and conceptual dimensions, and that it needed to be marketoriented and market-driven. Drucker’s systematic approach to innovation helped
bring about the programs of research and development funded by large American
companies like Kodak, Dow Chemical and General Electric. In this approach we
observe a kind of early turn towards innovation undertaken by large industrial
conglomerates, especially in Europe and the United States. In a parallel line of
development, kaizen approaches to continuous innovation were seen in Japan, for
example in Toyota’s assembly lines and in other Japanese business flourishing in its
post-war period of peace and reconstruction. Kaizen, kanban and related
continuous quality and innovation practices were eventually brought to India
through the establishment of automotive production and design facilities in India
beginning with the Maruti-Suzuki joint venture in the 1980s and then with the
growth of India’s own automobile corporations, including Tata and Mahindra.
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where, in the words of author Steven Johnson, do those good ideas come from?
Since Thomas Edison built Menlo Park in 1876, we have imagined that those
‘inventions’ come from Science Buildings, R&D Centers, Laboratories of some
kind. That’s not entirely wrong, of course, for that is where most intellectual
property is in fact created around the world, but that intellectual property is often
productized through licensing agreements and special purpose vehicles that leave
their inventors behind in the labs in which they are most comfortable. New
entrepreneurs with game-changing ideas aren’t most at home in laboratories —
they mostly live in the real world, out here with the rest of us.
Since Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built Apple Computers in 1976 out of the
Jobs family garage, it has become more widely recognized that start-ups need
space and support of some kind in order to realize their vision. And so, over the
past two decades, we have witnessed the rise of incubators, first attached to
educational institutions and then in the private sector, funded by venture
capitalists who seek, in some way, to farm the innovativeness of a whole cohort
of young entrepreneurs, on whom they have placed bets of varying sizes at varying
stages of their growth. At first these clustered around the Bay Area of San
Francisco, but then migrated to the greater Boston area and New York City, but
now can be found in practically every city of the world with aspirations to host
what Richard Florida calls the ‘creative class.’ Such centers can now be found in
Bombay and Bangalore, not to mention Pune, Kanpur, and other university
towns across India.
The idea that young people need a desk and a place to get coffee while they come
up with the next big thing makes sense, but they do tend to take rather long
going about it — in fact, if you give them a year, they’ll take a year or two. Isn’t
there any way to speed this process up? A small group of investors put together a
program called Y-Combinator five years ago, which pulled together a cohort of
seed entrepreneurs for a boot-camp of just about three months, in which they had
to pull everything together or face the axe. The continuing success of the program
has made everyone in the venturing community sit up and take notice: it isn’t all
about the space, but about the kinds of inputs that go into a cohort of
entrepreneurs that can make for success. The metaphor of the hatchery has given
way to that of a cyclotron: investors shouldn’t be waiting around for nature to
take its course, but speeding particles up to light speed and then shooting
them out into the market.
The kind of approach to innovation that one observes in the context of start-up
innovation may appear very different from the activities of a laboratory or studio
environment. The personalities involved, the kinds of education they might have
received, their relationship with and orientation to the market may all be quite
different. And yet, what binds them, it seems to me, is that their varied forms of
life are all oriented towards increasingly regular and organized modes of
collaboration and interaction with one another, which moreover, come to be
more and more reliably productive in their market effects. All these forms of life,
therefore, represent alternative approaches to innovation, which must be studied
together, under a single conceptual framework in order for us to be make sense
of the question of innovation.
Innovation and Design
It is striking that neither management studies nor engineering is able to offer
any account of the inner dynamics of innovation. Rather, they tell us only about
the physical, organizational and social elements, resources and conditions might
be necessary for innovation. This is to say, these accounts of innovation operate
almost exclusively from the outside of people’s thoughts, impressions, sensibilities
and consciousness. This is necessary, but not sufficient. In order to understand
innovation in subjective and interior terms, we must have recourse not only to
sciences of the interior, such as psychology and cognitive science, but also applied
disciplines which teach subjects how to organize ideas, to synthesize thoughts,
and how to move them along, from abstract concept through prototype and on
towards a solution. The name for that still-emerging discipline is Design.
If, as Schumpeter more or less says, innovation describes the business or economic
dimension of the forward movement of society under capitalism, then the
immanent, cognitive or mental aspect of this forward movement can be captured
by the term design. It is the multivariate, parallel, sometimes collaborative process
of finding solutions to problems that have no obvious and available answer.
Whereas the language of design gained prominence in the Industrial Age as a
means for the rendering of surfaces and finishes for the more effective marketing
of consumer products (‘posters and toasters’), the concept has far wider
application in the present. The most effective practitioners and users of design
in contemporary times have proved, time and again, that a multidimensional
approach to design that encompasses all levels and aspects of the user experience,
including the making and reinforcement of meaning and value for the user, also
yields the greatest success in the market.
The history of industrialism and Fordist manufacturing in the few urban
centers of world where we have seen it established since the end of the nineteenth
century suggests that mass manufacturing becomes possible and predictable on
account of a highly specific form of planning, thinking, visualization, annotation
and drawing that come together as the discipline and practice of design. As has
been abundantly documented even by its critics, this is a result of further
specialization and a division of labor between those who conceptualize
manufactured wares and those who actually build and make those objects.
Think of, for example, a toaster.
A parallel line of development traces block-making and print-making through
increasingly powerful means for four-color offset printing and other means for the
mass production of billboards, hoardings and other means of mass
communication. Fontography, color theory, and the increasingly powerful
juxtaposition of image and text as means to induce understanding on the part
of the viewing spectator are therefore the object of communications and visual
design, which may be used to create, for example, posters.
The creative methods and embodied knowledges and skills required for creating
posters, toasters and other classic objects of industrial mass manufacture, however
are not what we now mean by the word design. In the context of the
contemporary globalized, informationalized and services-oriented economy, people
rather have in mind forms of ethnography and user studies, conceptual diagram
making, services-strategy creation, use case analysis, prototyping, user interface
design and user experience enhancement. All of these activities, may be in some
sense derived from classic industrial industrial and communications design
methods, but they have since moved far beyond them. In this sense the term
design is being used in an extended or metaphoric way, to refer to the kind
of creativity and multivariate problem-solving that one has known in the past to
have been successfully use for the design of things and surfaces, but which must
now be used to design complex services, systems, interactions and experiences.
One of the great challenges involved in the creation of any sophisticated
consumer good, be it product, service or system, is its complexity, owing to the
multiple dimensions of meaning and possible value, each of which needs to be
aligned to the consumer’s needs and expectations, and also to all the other
dimensions, so as to create a harmonious and integrated whole. It often seems
nearly impossible for any one intellect to hold together in his or her mind all
these different requirements, variable options, possible alignments and points of
misalignment at once. At the same time, when different functional teams try to
come together to develop a new version of a consumer product, we may
encounter the trend towards mediocrity and even stupidity that is known as
‘design by committee.’ Clearly, leadership is required for innovation to arise, and
at the same time there must be some way for the distinctive insights and
knowledges of different specialist teams come together and contribute towards
this more complex whole which is the new consumer good. In trying to address
this question, much has been made of so-called ‘design thinking’ over the past few
years, which has perhaps been best addressed by Tim Brown in a series of
books and essays.
Brown defines design thinking in a variety of different ways, including as a
human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit.
The problem with this definition really is how to distinguish design thinking from
design. We must necessarily consider design an intellectual act, albeit with diverse
physical, social and interactional manifestations, for example, drawing, making
post-its, writing things down, maybe even measuring and calibrating, talking to
people and frequently scratching one’s chin. Where does that leave design
thinking? Well, it is all of these actions, only done by someone who doesn’t think
of himself as a designer. As Socrates might point out, if someone draws from
a designer’s toolkit to act as a designer then he is indeed acting in virtue of his
power to design, and is indeed the designer. The term ‘design thinking’ seems to
have come about on account of a wide-spread misunderstanding of what design
is — that it is something concerned with the surfaces of things rather than their
total meaning and every layer and dimension which contributes towards it. The
confusion also arises out of the need to mark territory and to distinguish between
‘professional designers,’ who putatively design, and others who may be capable of
thinking like designers. But this distinction is untenable. All managers, engineers,
entrepreneurs, decision-makers who think synthetically about the data available to
them in order to solve problems are designing.
The question really is how well they are doing so. Are they capable of handling
complex, multivariate and recursive problems and arrive and something new and
hitherto unimagined? Or do they keep reaching for the shelf for tried-and-tested
modular solutions? As discussed above, one definition of design is that it is the
means through which difficult, intractable and wicked or recursive problems are
solved. The verb form of that process is designing, and it applies to anyone,
professionally accredited to draw on a whiteboard or not.
Technical, conceptual and strategic forms of design are all involved with the
process of innovation at various levels and form a necessary part of it. But
innovation as a whole cannot be reduced to design. This is because innovation is
also a business process and a mode for the production of value in an economy. It
represents that elusive and difficult synthesis and harnessing of the unstable and
unpredictable flashes of creativity and inspiration within a larger arc of
repetition, iteration and routinization. It harnesses the fire of human creativity
to larger organizational and social purposes.
An Emerging Economy turns to Innovation
In the absence of a long experience of industrialization, India’s approach to
innovation has proceeded along a substantially different path. In particular, it
would appear that artisanal, folk and street approaches to creativity and problem
solving have served as one of the dominant metaphors through which people have
tried to come to terms with the concept of innovation. Anil K. Gupta’s Honeybee
Network, for instance, documents and promotes rural innovations devised in
different regions of India. The National Innovation Foundation similarly
supports such rural innovators and explores ways in which to productize and scale
up their innovations. Such innovations have included, for instance, many
ingenious contraptions that reduce drudgery in domestic or artisanal agri-processing tasks through the application of pulleys, gears, and other simple machines,
either attached to cycle pedals or else to a basic internal combustion engine.
These ingenious homemade technologies sometimes resemble pre-modern Dutch
windmills or else the post-apocalyptic vision of the Madmax movie, wherein
remaindered and used industrial technologies are refitted and refurbished to
new purposes.
The efforts of rural and street innovators in India are widely perceived to represent
the phenomenon of jugaad, which is understood to be a uniquely Indian
approach to ingenious problem solving, often through the quick assembly of
other ready-to-hand objects or artifacts. The word jugaad means something like
jury-rigged, or a quick-fix form of problem solving, not to be confused with
conventional forms of artisanal or craftsmanlike joinery. The term is derived
from the Sanskrit √yunj (yunakti) and is therefore cognate with the modern
English words union, joint, and yoke.
Alongside its many enthusiasts, however, jugaad also has its critics. Many industry
leaders in India, for instance, have pointed out that jugaad cannot be scaled up
and precisely because it represents a quick-and-dirty homemade solution, it can
command no higher value in the marketplace. From this perspective, jugaad may
represent a starting point for innovation, but it signifies the past rather than the
future of innovation in India.
Another approach to innovation that has entered into wide currency in India is
so-called ‘frugal innovation.’ In its mid-term assessment of the eleventh five-year
plan, the National Planning Commission stressed the need for innovation in
India in order to ‘accelerate its growth and ... to make growth more inclusive as
well as environmentally sustainable.’ The document went on to say that ‘India
needs more frugal innovation that produces more frugal cost products and
services that are affordable by people at low levels of incomes without
compromising the safety, efficiency, and utility of the products. The country also
needs processes of innovation that are frugal in the resources required to produce
the innovations. The products and processes must also have frugal impact on the
earth’s resources.’
The late management guru C. K. Prahalad, along with innovation thinker R.A.
Mashelkar, have postulated what they call the More-from-Less-for-More (MLM)
theory of Innovation, which advocates a focus on innovations that allow for more
production using less resources but benefit more people. The authors argue that
such an approach to innovation is most appropriate for Indian industry as well
as for the Indian economy, which must be able to quickly show the benefits of
investments in innovation to both industry and society.
A second stage of innovation can be distilled from the work of the eminent
management thinker R. A. Mashelkar of the National Innovation Foundation,
who defines innovation as the search for new solutions that do more with less for
more. That is to say, they should provide more value using less inputs, be they
cost, energy, effort or time, and serve more consumers and users than was
hitherto possible. This kind of approach to thinking about innovation for India
and similar world regions was pioneered by the late management guru C. K.
Prahalad. If we think about innovation in this way, several success stories from
India immediately come to mind.
Consider the Tata Nano, a small car that uses less materials and more inexpensive
inputs than regular cars, that is cheaper to manufacture, which sells for less, and
which therefore can reach a larger potential market than any other existing car.
Consider the Tata Swach, possibly the world’s cheapest and most widely available
water filtration system, which will ensure that no matter what kinds of impurities
exist in the water near your home, you can always have access to cheap,
plentiful drinking water. And consider Tata’s chain of Ginger hotels, which
guarantee a lower cost business hotel experience that will be clean, reliable and
affordable, and which is now growing across India at an astonishing rate. With
these several successes under its belt, the Tata Group may well claim to have a
head start and perhaps even a growing lead in India’s future innovation story.
I was recently asked to adjudge the innovation awards of another Indian
conglomerate. Over the course of the day I sat with other members of the
review panel to witness some sixteen presentations from an extraordinary variety
of teams. These included automobile designers, interface designers, automotive
engineers, software and strategy teams, user-interface design teams, intrapreneurs
in the area of farm technology and agricultural businesses and other innovative
propositions I could never have imagined. The quality of innovations also varied
substantially. In some cases we did tell the team members that in our view they
didn’t really have an innovation case to present — they were simply doing their
job, and really well at that! There was lots of technical innovation, hidden entirely
from view from the customer, but improving engineering performance, reducing
weight, and improving the durability and life-cycle of the engineering part. There
were several ingenious user-interface innovations, both mechanical or
electro-mechanical as well as in the form of software, which allowed users to
better understand what was going on with the technology they were using. There
were some extraordinary new visions for how rural businesses could be managed,
using technology and new rural networks. And in one bright case all these things
came together: new fundamental science, a mash-up of new and existing
technologies, a new business case and a tremendous competitive advantage
emerging on account of all these things together — disruptive, entrepreneurial
innovation that brings us into a new world, a new social and economic threshold,
a new state of being.
Impressive though these examples are, how do they stack up against the most
important innovations of the last decade? Here we should think of things like
online search, social networking, personal media devices, personal mobility
solutions. We have yet to encounter anything like India’s Google, Facebook, iPad
(or iPod, take your pick), or Segway, which is to say, a technology-enabled
experience which fundamentally transforms the way one can experience reality,
live one’s life, interact with one’s peers, traverse the city, or make new things.
Unfortunately, we have not really reinvented the car, or water or a hotel
room-night, but just made it more accessible to more people by making it
cheaper.
Impressive though these examples are, how do they stack up against the most
important innovations of the last decade? Here we should think of things like
online search, social networking, personal media devices, personal mobility
solutions. We have yet to encounter anything like India’s Google, Facebook, iPad
(or iPod, take your pick), or Segway, which is to say, a technology-enabled
experience which fundamentally transforms the way one can experience reality,
live one’s life, interact with one’s peers, traverse the city, or make new things.
Unfortunately, we have not really reinvented the car, or water or a hotel roomnight, but just made it more accessible to more people by making it cheaper.
I recently asked Sam Pitroda if he was concerned that India’s approach to
innovation seemed to be limited to these thirteenth century fixums or else to
de-engineering and price-pointing, in the form of so-called frugal innovation. He
told me he was not worried about this, because in a poor country like India,
innovations had to be within the financial reach of the people. But this requires
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us to think more carefully about costs of innovation as opposed to costs of
production or consumption. It is only when we conflate these that parsimony
prevents us from discovering new solutions to the everyday life problems and
challenges of our people. This might include, for example, better ways of warding
off mosquitoes and pests from one’s home. Cheap yet customizable
pharmacological and nutraceutical products that promote good health for all.
Alternative energy solutions that come to be integrated into our building
technologies, construction practices and regulatory codes. Radically new ways
of effective waste and water treatment right within the home to promote water
recycling. Collapsible-folding living space and transportation solutions. Ways of
controlling urban sound pollution, either at source, or else through personal or
domestic envelopes. More user-friendly, calmer, and more efficient urban mass
transit and transportation solutions.
We need to start thinking about innovation in terms of being able to do things
that were hitherto not only not possible, but not even conceivable. This is a
considerably higher benchmark to work towards. And it is sobering to
acknowledge that if we use this higher benchmark, we have not yet been
architects of innovation in a true sense. I take heart in the fact that this new
horizon seems possible and available to us, in a way that it never did before,
even just a decade ago.
The absence of an established culture of innovation is intrinsically linked to many
of the most intractable problems facing India as a nation. These include poor
delivery of government services, inadequate systems of personal identification
and the absence of widely available financial services for rural poor, health and
sanitation failures. This list can go on. Cumulatively, the inability of India as a
nation, society and economy to adequately provide for its own population no
longer reflects a failure of implementation, but rather of a failure of innovation,
for there are not immediately-available, off-the-shelf solutions that would make
it possible for these grand challenges facing India to be redressed.
The Four Stages of Innovation
To summarize the claims made in the preceding section, allow me to reiterate.
There are four kinds of approaches to innovation that one encounters in an
emerging economy such as India, which we also encounter as a series of steps or
stages:
First there is Jugaad. The most basic, unstructured and local expression of innate
human ingenuity, but triggered on account of the intersection between industrial
and agricultural modes of production.
Then there is Frugal Innovation. The direction of that very same human
ingenuity by mercantile parsimony towards the lowering of cost without any
increase in value.
Then there is Product Development. Diverse techniques for routine,
incremental, internal innovation may have been imported from Japan
(automotive sector) or may have been adopted from northern Europe (telecom
and mobile devices) or else from Silicon Valley (software and web services).
And finally there is Truly Disruptive Value-Creating Innovation. This is a bit
of a black swan that isn’t yet barking, inasmuch as we all want to see this
happen in India, but the evidence is not there yet, that it is really there to be had.
But this is the disruptive market-creating discovery of new value on account of
multiple different alignments of product, technology platform, partner network,
user-experience refinements, and other mash-ups of multiple other innovations
that then goes on to define our social and economic life in a tremendous new way.
These are the innovations that are likely to transform the current state of India’s
economy and society in unprecedented ways, and which have the best chance of
truly ameliorating the lifestyles and livelihoods of the most impoverished people
in our society.
These four approaches to innovation are not, of course, equal — some are much
more effective than others, while also requiring vastly higher thresholds of talent,
competence and capacity. But they are, in some sense, sequential, in that time and
again we have observed organizations, individuals, small groups in India approach
the question of innovation and arrive at these sequential stages of innovation in a
189
190
predictable series, rising to a higher threshold only after they have come
to terms with a more primary stage. Perhaps for the same reasons, higher
thresholds of innovation assume information and competence already resident
in lower stages, while the reverse does not hold — there is nothing in jugaad or
frugal innovation that is not also to be found in more complex approaches to
innovation. Higher forms of innovation hold that much greater promise for
addressing and solving the grand challenges facing this society and other similar
societies.
As we have discussed above, if a non-industrialized economy proceeds on the
path of innovation it will necessarily trace a route at considerable variance from
that undertaken by an industrialized economy. One of the markers of this
variation is in fact the use of the concept of design in to think about or describe
processes of innovation. Societies that have industrialized and massified are
comfortable using the terms and concepts of design, while for emerging
economies this language has limited reference, relevance and meaning, and
concepts like jugaad and cost-cutting prove more appealing and persuasive as
means for beginning the journey of innovation. Both sets of terms serve here
as only metaphors for the real object of our inquiry, innovation.
A deeper understanding of what is meant by innovation, an appreciation for the
varying approaches to innovation and their likely benefits are all preamble for our
larger objective: the use of innovation approaches to actually benefit everyday
people through the redressal of the large outstanding challenges of our age,
including, for instance our urban and built environment, our energy ecology, our
means of food production and distribution, and our systems of water and
sanitation management. These are the problems to which innovation must now
be applied.
191
A Glossary on Design,
Innovation and the Public Interest
From the time of the Siva-Sutras through to the Hobson-Jobson Dictionary and the
techno-futurist writings of J. G. Ballard, definitions and redefinitions have served as
critical means through which to establish new discourses and constitute new communities.
Our Glossary on Design, Innovaiton and the Public Interest, therefore, falls somewhere
between the Amara-Kosha and the Devil’s Dictionary of Ambrose Bierce.
In this glossary you will find a number of terms that are often used by designers and
innovation specialists. We have also addressed key terms related to governance, statecraft
and the public interest. We hope you will find these entries to be useful for reference
before, during and after the Conclave.
Where we have found good definitions ready-to-hand, we have specifically cited the
authors or institutions who have provided them. In all other cases these definitions have
been developed in collaboration with colleagues at the Center for Knowledge Societies.
208
Apple An American corporation that
reigns as the current organizational
embodiment of Design, Innovation,
and User-Centered thinking, creating
products that seem to anticipate Users’
expectations and desires before they are
even aware that they have them.
— Prahalad, C. K., and Venkat
Ramaswamy. The Future of
Competition: Co-creating Unique Value
with Customers.Boston, MA: Harvard
Business School Publishing, 2004.
See also: Consumer Value
Concept Design The description of
a possible Design solution in words,
diagrams, and other forms of text
and visualization to communicate an
imminent possibility that does not yet
exist. Concept Design is the first and
fundamental stage of design, from
which the proposed solution may
come to be described to increasing
levels of fidelity.
Brainstorming A collaborative activity
in which small groups work together to
generate as many new ideas or
solutions to a problem as they can in
response to particular kinds of stimulus
and a particular framing of the
problem. Ethnographic data is often
the best form of stimulus. Large format
index cards or post-it notes are good
ways for participants to express their
ideas. Team members should seek to
build upon one another’s ideas and to
express them visually, so far as possible.
Co-creation
“...increasingly, the joint efforts of the
consumer and the firm - the firm’s
extended network and consumer
communities together - are cocreating
value through personalized experiences
that are unique to each individual
consumer. This proposition challenges the
fundamental assumptions about our
industrial system - assumptions about
value itself, the value creation process,
and the nature of the relationship
between the firm and the consumer. In
this new paradigm, the firm and the
consumer co-create value at points of
interaction. Firms cannot think and act
unilaterally.”
See also: Crowdsourcing
Consumer Value The benefits and
advantages experienced or perceived by
a consumer beginning well before the
moment of purchase, at the point of
retail sale, extending through the
product’s lifetime and period of use,
and beyond into the memory and
imagination of the consumer as and
when she should have occasion to
reflect on the myriad ways in which
the consumer good in question has
impacted her life, style, values and
livelihood.
Convergent Thinking
“The ability to narrow the number of
possible solutions to a problem by
applying logic and knowledge.”
— “Convergent Thinking.” Gale
Encyclopedia of Psychology. Farmington
Hills, MI: Gale Group, 2001.
See also: Divergent Thinking
Creative Destruction
“The opening up of new markets, foreign
or domestic, and the organizational
development from the craft shop to such
concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same
process of industrial mutation—if I may
use that biological term—that incessantly
revolutionizes the economic structure
from within, incessantly destroying the
old one, incessantly creating a new one.
This process of Creative Destruction
is the essential fact about capitalism.”
— Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy, 2nd edition.
Mansfield Center: Martino Publishing,
2011
Crowdsourcing The inclusion of
large groups or the public at large into
specific forms of decision making or
solutioneering using public platforms
such as websites, wikis, mobile media or other mechanisms that allow
members of such groups to contribute
ideas or propositions and for others to
validate, ratify or improve them.
Design 1. Any expression of intentionality
or purposiveness by an agent,
including for example the scratching
of one rock against another. 2. The
process or path through which a final
solution comes about. 3. The iterative
description of a proposed solution,
using language, gesture, text,
visualization, plastic modeling, and any
other form of human expression, to
increasingly higher degrees of
fidelity, until it approximates the object
of design itself. 4. To see the world
other than it is, to see it as it could or
should be.
design An increasingly fragmented
set of visually-related competencies,
acquired more through apprenticeship
than through formal training, that
subserve the needs of post-modern
consumer capitalism.
Design Analysis 1.Ways of thinking,
conceptualizing, imagining, and
envisioning solutions to problems that
(i) redefine the fundamental challenge
or task at hand, (ii) develop multiple
possible options and solutions in
parallel, and (iii) prioritize and select
those which are likely to achieve the
greatest benefits in terms of, for
example, impact, viability and cost.
2. A collective and social process, that
allows small and large groups to work
together in relation to collected and
available information about a complex
challenge, that can lead to innovative
ideas, to new insights, and to new
actionable directions for organizations.
3. A process through which the express
and latent needs of Users can be
married with the technical capabilities
of a complex product or service in a
systematic and organized manner. 4. A
set of replicable, teachable
skills, which can be employed not
only within the private sector, but also
within government, within the public
sector and the social sector.
Design Engineering The technical
development of a Concept Design,
beyond its visual, formal and strategic
articulation, towards a working
prototype that will nearly resemble the
final product, by employing the tools
and technologies of material,
electronic, informatic or other
dimensions of Engineering.
Design Research All forms of data
capture, research, intelligence
gathering, and insight generation that
may serve to inform the design and
development of any product, service,
system or solution. Methodologies
commonly employed in the course of
Design Research may include
Ethnography, User interviews,
Usability tests, and other interactive
and immersive means for engaging
with and observing prospective Users.
Design Strategy An overarching
approach and systematic policy of
expressing, associating or otherwise
aligning the physical and aesthetic
values of a product or service with
the expectations and needs of Users
(based on underlying conceptual,
social, psychological or other factors) so
as to advance the commercial interests
of the manufacturers or providers.
Design Thinking Thinking like a
designer, while overtly doing something
else, for instance Ethnography, market
research, business strategy, training or
thought leadership.
211
“Design thinking is a human-centered
approach to innovation that draws from
the designer’s toolkit to integrate the
needs of people, the possibilities of
technology, and the requirements for
business success.”
— Tim Brown, President and CEO,
IDEO, <www.ideo.com/about/>
Divergent Thinking
“The ability to develop original and
unique ideas and to envision multiple
solutions to a
problem.”
— “Divergent Thinking.” Gale
Encyclopedia of Psychology. Farmington
Hills, MI: Gale Group, 2001.
See also: Convergent Thinking
Fifth Estate Civil Society, NonGovernmental Organizations, People’s
Groups. The set of social forces that
self-consciously identify as being
dedicated to the achievement of
societal benefits as distinct from
economic or political gain.
See also: Fourth Estate and Estates
of Society
Fourth Estate That column of society
which preeminently styles itself as
dedicated to and focused upon the
Public Interest.
See also: Fifth Estate and Estates of
Society
Ease of Use
“[Usability/ease of use] has been defined
in a very broad and inclusive manner as
“the quality of use in context.” However,
the practice has focused heavily on
task-centered thinking. If a given user
accomplishes a given task quickly and
without mistakes, the product is usable.
Understanding the user is in effect
understanding how that person performs
the relevant tasks. What particularly
characterizes the discipline is just how
detailed this understanding has to be.
The tasks to be evaluated are
deconstructed into the smallest pieces
imaginable.”
— Lindholm, Christian, Turkka
Keinonen, and Harri Kiljander. Mobile
Usability: How Nokia Changed the
Face of the Mobile Phone. New York:
McGraw- Hill, 2003.
Estates of Society 1. Discrete loci of
distinct forms of power to which
variant kinds of interest, purpose and
Intentionality then aggregate, cohere
and align. 2. A European concept
cognate with the Hindu varna.
Ethnography
“Ethnography involves the researcher’s
study of human behavior in the natural
settings in which people live. Specifically,
ethnography refers to the description of
cultural systems or an aspect of culture
based on fieldwork in which the
investigator is immersed in the ongoing
everyday activities of the designated
community for the purpose of describing
the social context, relationships and
processes relevant to the topic under
consideration. Ethnographic inquiry
focuses attention on beliefs, values,
rituals, customs, and behaviors of
individuals interacting within
socioeconomic, religious, political and
geographic environments.”
--American Anthropological
Association, <www.aaanet.org/stmts/
irb.htm>
Experience
“Experience is limited by all the causes
which interfere with perception of the
relations between undergoing and
doing. There may be interference because
of excess on the side of doing or of excess
on the side of receptivity, of undergoing. Unbalance on either side blurs the
perception of relations and leaves the
experience partial and distorted, with
scant or false meaning. Zeal for doing,
lust for action, leaves many a person
especially in this hurried and impatient
human environment in which we live,
with experience of an almost incredible
paucity, all on the surface. No one
experience has a chance to complete
itself because something else is entered
upon so speedily. What is called
experience becomes so dispersed and
miscellaneous as hardly to deserve the
name. Resistance is treated as an
obstruction to be beaten down, not as an
invitation to reflection. An individual
comes to seek, unconsciously even more
than by deliberate choice, situations in
which he can do the most things in the
shortest time.”
--Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New
York: Balch & Minton, 1934.
212
Governance The practice and process
of administration, management,
regulation, organization and
coordination of the machinery and
apparatuses of the state.
“The word yogakshema is a compound
made up of yoga, the successful
accomplishment of an objective and
kshema, its peaceful enjoyment.Thus,
peaceful enjoyment of prosperity, i.e. the
welfare of the people, is given as much
importance as knowledge, self-control,
and observance of dharma.”
— Kautilya, The Arthashastra of
Kautilya.Translated by L. N.
Rangarajan.Penguin, 1987.pp. 70-71.
Innovation 1. Bringing newness into
the world; making and remaking the
world anew. 2. The transformation of
insight into actionable knowledge that
can make new use of the social and
material technologies already available
in the world.
Innovation Cycle A process devised
at the Center for Knowledge Societies
to integrate three distinct components
of Design Thinking into a formal
innovation process, including: (i)
Understand: the use of ethnography
to describe the context, behaviors,
needs and preferences of users in their
everyday environment, (ii) Develop:
the conceptualization, creation,
development, detailing and
specification of multiple possible
solutions, and (iii) Enhance: the
testing, trialing, and refinement of
proposed solutions through
interactions with end-users either in
the field or laboratory conditions.
Innovation Workshop A specialized
environment in which small groups of
specialists work together in a highly
choreographed and coordinated way.
Through audio-visual stimulus and
instructions, they create new options,
possibilities or solutions using
techniques of data review, role-playing,
concepts generation, wordplay,
notetaking, visualization, and solution
creation (among many others).
Intentionality
“Intentionality is the power of minds to
be about, to represent, or to stand for,
things, properties and states of affairs.
Intentionality is a pervasive feature of
many different mental states: beliefs,
hopes, judgments, intentions, love
and hatred all exhibit intentionality.”
— Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
Kaizen Japanese for “improvement”
or “change for the better,” refers to the
continuous improvement of processes
in diverse organizational systems.
It refers to activities that continually
improve all functions, and involves
all grades of personnel from the head
of an organization to its frontline staff.
It can also apply to processes such
as purchasing and logistics that cross
organizational boundaries to become
part of an entire industry, supply
chain, or national economy.
Planning A fusion of the individual
psychological and cognitive process of
imaginative forethought with the social
and organizational process of arriving
and agreeing to a plan. Planning is
aided by having rich accurate data
about the facts on the ground,
insightful representations of that
information in the form of maps,
charts and other kinds of diagrams,
and social organizational techniques
which allow groups to organize their
thought collectively.
a web; cyberspace is not a space; and so
with the public sphere. It’s the virtual
space where the citizens of a country
exchange ideas and discuss issues, in order
to reach agreement about ‘matters of
general interest”
— Jurgen Habermas, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society (Studies in Contemporary
German Social Thought). English ed.
trans. by Thomas Berger. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1991.
“In preparing for battle I have always
found that plans are useless, but planning
is indispensable.”
— Dwight D. ‘Ike’ Eisenhower
Social Change A significant alteration
in the existing social order of a
society, which may be driven by
cultural, religious, philosophical,
economic, scientific or technological
forces. It can be endogenous (driven by
internal factors) or exogenous (brought
about by external factors) or a
combination therein. It can be either
uni-directional, or cyclical, as in the
case of the business cycle.
See also: Innovation Workshop
Public That external horizon which is
the culmination of diverse individual,
private, or local interests, projects and
goals, but which remains superordinate
to them all.
Public Interest That static, possibly
unknowable quantity which arises
upon the integration of all the vector
forces operating within a society, which
represent individual, private, or local
interests.
Public Sphere
“The public sphere is . . . a metaphorical
term used to describe the virtual space
where people can interact. . . . The World
Wide Web, for example, is not actually
Service Design
“Service design is a design specialism that
helps develop and deliver great services.
Service design projects improve factors
like ease of use, satisfaction, loyalty and
efficiency right across areas such as
environments, communications and
products – and not forgetting the
people who deliver the service.”
— Engine Service Design, <http://
www.enginegroup.co.uk/service_
design/>
State 1. A social organization capable
of making war, peace and political
alliances so as to enlarge the territory
under its authority (Kautilya). 2. The
ultimate expression of human
rationality (Hegel) 3. That entity
which holds a monopoly over
legitimate violence (Weber). 4. The
vector sum of all lines of power in a
society (Foucault). 5. That institution
which is ultimately and cumulatively
responsible for the equity, upliftment
and welfare of its members
(Ambedkar).
Usability
“The design has been optimized for
human usage with respect to task
completion, speed, accuracy, self-evidency
(minimized training requirement),
satisfaction, and safety. This does not
mean that every user will be able to
operate the offering in a flawless way (or
even avoid lethal mistakes). It means
that care is taken to optimize the design
so that the overall usage by the target
population of users is effective.”
— Schaffer, Eric M. and Susan
Weinschenk. Certified Usable Designs:
Products, Applications and Web Sites.
Human Factors International, 2010.
Use Case 1. The counterform of the
product or service offering. 2. A
narrative example that captures the
specific instance in which a real or
imagined product or service offers
value or meaning to its User.
215
“A particular form or pattern or
exemplar of usage, a scenario that begins
with some user of the system initiating
some transaction or sequence of
interrelated events.”
— Jacobson, Ivar (et al). ObjectOriented Software Engineering: A Use
Case Driven Approach. AddisonWesley, 1992.
User-Centered Approaches or
strategies that focus on and proceed
from an understanding of the
expectations and needs of the User of a
product, service or technology, as
distinct from the possibilities of
technology, market forces, media, or
any other set of social or organizational
factors. User Experience Design An
approachto the Design of things and
environments which seeks to envision
how their ultimate User might
encounter and interact with that
artifact or system; the purpose of the
Design is to have made possible a
particular quality or character of
experience for most if not all of those
end-users.
Visualization The transformation of
linguistic, textual, numeric or
otherwise symbolic information into a
diagram, map, or other form of graphic
illustration so as to express or provoke
a new kind of understanding of the
same information.
User An individual agent or subjective
self who uses linguistic, cultural,
symbolic and material technologies to
manipulate or navigate the world in
which she finds herself.
Wicked Problem 1. A subclass of
problems for which there is no ready
to-hand or off-the-shelf solution, but
which can only be addressed through
Design (with a capital ‘D’). 2. All
complex problems of state and society
in which different stakeholders have
radically different world views and
divergent frames for understanding the
problem, which moreover, may change
over time. 3. Problems which have no
formulation, owing to which the
definition of the problem turns out to
be a Wicked Problem.
“The search for scientific bases for
confronting problems of social policy is
bound to fail because of the nature of
[wicked] problems...Policy problems
cannot be definitively described. Moreover,
in a pluralistic society there is nothing
like the indisputable public good; there is
no objective definition of equity; policies
that respond to social problems cannot be
meaningfully correct or false; and it makes
no sense to talk about ‘optimal solutions’ to
these problems...Even worse, there are no
solutions in the sense of definitive
answers.”
— Rittel, H.W.J. The Reasoning of
Designers. Stuttgart: Institut fur
Grundlagen der Planung, 1988.
216
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About the Author
Aditya Dev Sood is a leading expert on
innovation, particularly its relationship to
Design, Entrepreneurship and Social Change.
He is the founder of the Center for Knowledge
Societies, which uses ethnographic research,
design anlysis and user experience modelling
to make new things possible.