The Hindu Business Line : Patently, India lags behind!

JAPAN'S patent authorities received nearly 4.5 lakh applications last year while India, whose population is nine times more than Japan's, received only 12,000. And what's worse, a bulk of them was from foreign parties.

Why does India fare so poorly in this aspect? Creativity consultant Prof. S.D. Tase blamed it on the absence of a culture of innovation.At a two-day workshop on `Patenting in India and Abroad - 2004' here, Prof. Tase discounted the view that getting a patent meant solving a chakravyuha. "It is not a chakravyuha. It's an open-ended highway where everyone can tread on," he said.

He called for a panchsheel to build an innovation-centred India: creativity, invention, innovation, patent and entrepreneurship.

"Every person should have one innovation in his lifetime. If each one of us could generate one idea, we could pool up a repository of 100 crore ideas. Even if we set aside the duplications, we can easily settle with 10 crore ideas," Prof. Tase said.

"People have the notion that only the greatest ideas can be patented. It is wrong. Even small ones can be patented," he said.

Prof. Tase also found fault with the opinion that people need to wait till they perfect their innovation to patent it. "There is a danger in waiting for perfection. The first thing you should do is patent your idea. You can always innovate further and modify it," he said.

He, however, said it might take a very long time to get the patent. He cited the example of Chester F. Carlson, the inventor of the copying machine. "It took seven years for him to get a patent," he said.

According to him, there is no dearth of ideas. Mr Yoshiro Nakamatsu, whose host of inventions include the floppy disk and the CD, generated ideas continuously.