The Hindu Business Line : Laboratories of life

The innovation may be ingenious and simple, but the lack of wherewithal to scale up is a hindrance. (In file photo) T. Ramesh displays his iron working on LPG in Hyderabad.

India’s innovation gallery bursts with vibrant examples of grassroot innovations: the bullock-cart remodelled with a pulley and ratchet to draw well water, the Enfield motorcycle refitted with a spiked cylinder that doubles up as a tractor, the environment-friendly fabric made by extracting banana cotton from waste banana stems. In the words of Dr Mashelkar, the former director general of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, these are “innovators who innovate in the laboratories of life and yet never get recognised”. The ingenuity with which these inventors, most of them with little or no education, have devised creative solutions to the problems they face in their daily lives is amazing. Is there something corporate India can learn from the experience of the non-corporate sector in coming up with uniquely Indian solutions to uniquely Indian problems?

It’s a yes and a no. Definitely, the MBA brainstorming in the air-conditioned pod especially designed to stimulate creativity could pick up a clue or two from the passion and commitment demonstrated by inventors at the other end of the continuum. Against all odds, they’ve managed to propel their concepts and prototypes out of their villages, seeking the possibility of funding and partnering. These grassroot inventors demonstrate the essence of innovation and its potential for changing lives – they live with the problem, they muse over what can be done about it, they juggle scarce resources, they improvise ... and they persevere. Innovation is all about contemplating a better tomorrow and wanting to be part of that change, and there is much inspiration to be derived from such journeys.

However, if you delve deeper, a host of troubling issues also surface.

When I spoke to Paul Basil, founder of Rural Innovations Network (RIN), he brought home to me the very real danger in romanticising grassroots innovation. The stories of innovators whom RIN has partnered in its mission to “enrich rural lives by enabling innovations to reach the market” result in a warm, fuzzy glow – there’s a strong feel-good factor in seeing an uneducated, resource-poor farmer conceptualise, design, prototype and market an invention. There’s Anna Sahib, a seventy-year-old sugarcane farmer from Karnataka who made the Varsha Rain Gun – a watering gun that saves 50 per cent on water and can irrigate one acre of sugarcane field in one-and-a-half hours. There’s Manoharan, lathe owner in Battalagundu in Tamil Nadu, who devised a banana-stem injector which can deliver pesticides directly into the pseudostem of a diseased banana, saving indiscriminate usage of pesticide. There’s Kathiresan who devised the sugarcane detrasher, which removes dry leaves from sugarcane stalks with ease.

Yet, while these and the myriad other stories demonstrate a vibrant, ingenious India at the grassroots, reality intrudes: Many of these ideas are fringe, marginal concepts, and not scalable. In Paul’s estimate, from a scale perspective, from a real end-user impact perspective, not more than 10 out of 500 ideas would qualify.

A huge amount of work needs to be done in the Indian innovation ecosystem before the full value of such grassroots ideation can be transformed into value-generating products and services. There are marketing and distributing partnerships that need to be conceptualised and executed. Tricky intellectual property issues confront those who build on the original germ of an idea and take it forward.

And more fundamentally, inventors need to be mentored and trained on how to build on their concepts and take them forward using customer feedback and forming downstream alliances. Not all the entrepreneurs appreciate the customer and are willing to hand their babies over for development. In Paul’s estimate, only around 5 per cent of the innovators would qualify as entrepreneurs. This is partly due to fear of the risks associated, and the lack of ambition in many innovators, and more fundamentally, the inability to de-link from an idea, to judge it unemotionally and to re-work it to improve customer outcomes. Most corporate chieftains would empathise with the situation – these are issues that impede innovation in larger organisations as well.

Consider this: the corporate, ‘organised’ sector struggles with creativity (60 per cent of managers polled in the Paradigm Innovation Survey, 2006 cited shortage of ideas as a barrier to innovation) and is on the quest to find the pot of gold at the bottom of the pyramid. At the other end of the continuum are grassroot inventors and innovators intimately aware of the nature of solutions required to improve their lives, and yet, lacking the wherewithal to scale these up.

Perhaps the crux of the problem is in this demarcation itself – that of boxing the corporate, “commercial” business models on one side, and the non-corporate, “social” models on the other. What’s needed is a model that blurs the boundaries between these two sectors, forming a productive alliance that addresses both these lacunae, matching the ingenuity and passion of the grassroots inventors, with the juggernaut of systems and resources at the corporate end, to fully realise the potential of these concepts for the greater good of a greater mass of people.

(Radhika Chadha is a consultant in strategy and innovation and co-author of Innovative India: Insights for the Thinking Manager.

Karate-gy is the proprietary name of the strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow Ltd.)

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