Innovation councils a great idea

National Innovation Council (NIC) has written to various states to set up state-level innovation council.

Such councils are needed in every state and the agenda given here might help states which really wish to transform the polity and make it more inclusive. National Innovation Foundation (NIF) is trying to link with each state to strengthen the dissemination as well as scouting of grassroots innovations and promote creativity among children.

Centre for Innovations in Public Systems (CIPS), set up on the basis of recommendation of 13th Finance Commission, is trying to pool innovations in public systems and find ways of replicating the same across sectors.

All these efforts need a strategic approach which should include several steps:

a) advising all educational institutions to exhort students to look around their settlements for crazy people who have found solutions to different problems in a creative manner, b) include lessons in different classes from middle school to postgraduate level  about example of people who have solved problems with which we had learned to live with for centuries, c) motivate field functionaries to benchmark the problems that people face, be it in economically backward or tribal regions or developed areas and also disseminate existing solutions, d) build stationery and mobile museums of innovations at block, district and state level to highlight new innovations from different parts of the country available with NIF and Honey Bee network and also other platforms, e) challenge children to look around and try creative ideas to address problems in everyday life (this time in Ignite children creativity and innovation award function, NIF got prototype built and patent filed on behalf of all children.

They had to just imagine and send a short description of their idea. Once set on this path, children will not acquire our bad habit of living with problems unsolved indefinitely); f) develop missions to address the problems that women workers face besides socially disadvantaged group such differently-abled groups, g) create facilities for institutions value addition in outstanding local traditional knowledge, and innovations therein, so that local communities get better return on their knowledge and resources they conserve (the Dangs district provides almost 50% raw material of prosperous ayurvedic industry in Gujarat and yet it has the highest poverty because of lack of local value addition), and h) link the unsolved problems of society, micro and small enterprises with www.techpedia.in platform created by sristi.org so that engineering and other technology students take up projects based on real life problem( I always say that every time a person solves a real life problem, he becomes a better human being).

In addition, State Innovation Councils should also try to look at the cultural creativity, educational and institutional innovations which stimulate local imagination and provide spur for minds on the precipice. There is hardly any policy specifying how can public places/walls/fora can be used to demonstrate creativity of the local unsung heroes of the society.

Let me illustrate. Let us say on one road in a city, we have posters of educational innovations painted on the walls, will it not inspire some teachers to try out experiments to improve educational outcomes.

During a shodh yatra in a village primary school in Nasik, we saw the names of outstanding achievers of that school written on the school wall. Imagine if every primary school had such names and children saw it every day, will not some of them be motivated to excel the existing standards.

The state-level councils must comprise people hungry for innovations and impatient in implementation. Otherwise, these councils will become another fossilised institution which will only celebrate inertia, mediocrity and parking places for people who never did anything worthwhile till they were in service but after retirement become champions of radical changes.

I hope that when every institution is trying to find creative and innovative ways of discovering new ways to connect with customers, SIC will not become a sick institution.