The Hindu Business Line : How to foster innovation?

Innovation should leave things in better shape than before, constituting a distinct improvement in terms of relevance, appropriateness, usefulness and value addition.

Innovation is one word that is being bandied about countless times in management and corporate literature. For all the trumpeting it has received, there has been very little attempt at delineation of its exact characteristics and ways of cultivating, inculcating or promoting it.

One does not get much help from the dictionary. As a verb, `innovate' is said to mean: To renew, alter; to introduce as something new; to introduce novelties; to make changes. As a noun, the meaning of innovation is put down as the act of innovating, or a thing introduced as a novelty or as a new idea, method or device. If this is all that there is to it, anyone changing anything, or simply plumping for whatever is new or novel, can be given the credit for innovating.

Obviously, the spirit of innovation stands for something more than the sum of these attributes. Any change, and any idea or method, to qualify for being described as innovation, should leave things in a better shape than before, constituting a distinct improvement in terms of relevance, appropriateness, usefulness and value-addition. It can be a modification, continuation, or adaptation of an existing mode, or a complete break with it, bringing in a totally new way of thinking or working. This applies to any form of human activity, whether in the academic sphere, scientific pursuits, realm of technology, industrial and business enterprises, or even government establishments.

Learning process

Is the spirit of innovation inborn or cultivated? It is both, but it is apt to be squelched in either context without a conducive environment helping to nurture and foster it. In such an environment, people will feel encouraged to experiment with new ideas and approaches, even if it entails making mistakes or risking failures. Actually, the enterprise concerned, of whatever kind, should make it known to all those associated with it that they should boldly go ahead and the cost or damage consequent on any mistake or failure will be willingly borne as an investment in the learning process and as an essential part of human resource development.

Wherever such an encouraging ambience exists, there is a dramatic upward swing in the performance of that enterprise. Unfortunately, most organisations are content to stick to familiar grooves of thinking and working, seldom daring to give free rein to the creativity and imagination of the human mind by pressing into service the full range of talents and skills available to them.

A Global Innovation study of 1,000 companies round the world conducted by Booze Allen Hamilton has, for instance, found that less than 10 per cent of them are high-leverage innovators in the sense of giving evidence of significantly better performance per R&D dollar over a sustained period. Assuming patents to be indicative of intellectual fermentation, the study was a disappointment in not showing any statistical correlation between the number and the quality of patents and overall performance.

It comes to the sad conclusion that "Money is wasted reinventing wheels that others have already rolled out. Good ideas get stuck in developmental bottlenecks. And promising innovations never get to market because of flawed understanding of customers' needs, and poor marketing and investment planning."

If this is the situation in advanced industrial countries, the leeway India has to make can easily be imagined. Actually, the Knowledge Commission, the Planning Commission and chambers of business and industry should jointly undertake a similar study on where and how India fares in this respect.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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