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India & Innovation
Why can't we see Uber of India? Apple of India or even Amazon of India?
India is a developing country, it is smart to adapt and replicate systems and services from developed countries. Customise to the socio-economic environment of the nation.
Hence we have Uber of India is Ola & Meru
Amazon of India is Flipkart & Snapdeal
Apple of India? I'm not sure, I personally am repulsive towards apple. India doesn't need to innovate for the sake of it.
After learning from Peter Thiel, we can consider Zero to One as Innovation, this is feasible by Developed nations as they are saturated with lifestyle change, and can afford to do R&D and spend million in research which may or may not have a good outcome. Where as countries like India are growing, we can not afford to lose money on experimental models and research. We are in the race to catch up with others. Hence we can adapt the existing innovation and innovate in it's process, innovate in it's business, innovate frugally.
Innovation happens continuously in India, it's just not seen.
Indian innovation can can fall in any of the below one or most of the cases many
Grassroot level innovation - Innovation for the poor, by the poor. Prof. Anil Gupta has contributed a lot in this field. This can be seen here. It's a bottom up approach to sustainibility.
Inclusive Innovation - Try to include and accomodate as many as possible
Frugal innovation - Jugaad way, being resourcefulness, improvisation, context sensitive solution
Reverse innovation - Design and develop for the developing nation and then adapt to developed nation, like how GE developed a battery operated portable ECG machine for Indian market, now has been adapted to Ambulances in NYC. By doing so the product becomes really competitive and tough to be challenged by other rival firms.
Invisible Innovation - This is what India is known for, after where Dr. Nirmala Kumar explains to the world. Why can't we see Indian innovation in the world? As he explains innovation is an ice berg, only the small tip is visible to us.
The developed countries have all the resources and innovation centers, but who heads them? Indians? So where did they get most of their education from? India of course. Now we also see majority of MNC which file the highest number of patents have Indians as a large chunk of their working force. Now we have 928 MNCs have their R&D centers in India? Why?
The MNC initially thought technology must be confined to developed nations and the developing nations like India should get the back end, low sophisticated jobs.
They did that, but eventually had to fill the gaps, they had to fill their spaces in the HQ, and guess who was filling those spots? Indians. So rather than relocating Indians they built Labs and Innovation centers in India, just imagine the amount of Indians in demand! There were so many people to fill those spots!
The largest growth market for their products is India, the R&D is based in India, so obviously the top management of the future has to come from India! And we can already see that, no awards for guessing. Say what Google, Apple and Microsoft?
