If the policymaker’s lexicon is full of catchwords that reflect New Delhi’s concern over its own image as an effective ruler, India’s industrial class has its own favourites, one of which is “innovation”.

Recently, an Innovation Day was celebrated by a television channel, with Chief Information Officers of various IT firms educating an audience on the wonders of data management and other frontier-edge technologies.

Six Innovation summits have been held so far in India; experts from Dr Mashelkar, the great innovating sprit behind CSIR’s makeover into a commercially-motivated innovative hub, to management gurus have cast their considerable intellectual nets far and wide. They offer India, proud of its economic achievements but uncertain about its innovative capacities, evidence of its self-fulfilment.

One word enshrined in the industrialists’ list of ambitions is, of course, “disruptive innovation.”

Disruption and change

The idea of disruptive innovation as a simple technology introduced into an established market from the bottom-up, with its own business model, was first developed by Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School in 1995. The beauty of that concept lay in its dialectic appeal: Christensen positioned disruptive innovation as a counterpoint to “sustained innovation”--- the act of refinement of existing dominant technologies at the top of the market.

Companies constantly innovate, that is, refine their products or services, to cater to the higher end of the market with more sophisticated, more expensive products and services. Sustaining innovation helps retain their position with the more demanding market segment (at the top end), generating huge profits. Then, along comes an agent-provocateur with an eye on the bottom end of priced-out consumers, with a technology and a business model at once appealing to the hitherto neglected consumers.

The dialectical cycle

In the pursuit of “sustaining innovation” that leads to higher profits from “discerning” clientele, firms tend to ignore the bottom, or rather, the business model does not have it in mind. They then face severe competition from the disruptions occurring there; at first a trickle often ignored, then the flood that can lead to attrition, that Schumpeterian process of “creative destruction.”

Christensen’s formulation could not have been better timed; the arrival of the digital age soon ushered in the disruptive process as never before, as mobile telephony spelt the end of fixed-line telephony; and that was just the beginning of the end for a host of iconic symbols.

One of them in America was, of course, the print media that is undergoing cataclysmic changes, extinction more likely, with the arrival of digital media. Not even television had that effect; it may have, as Neil Postman described in his wonderful book Amusing Ourselves to Death trivialised everything but it did not replace the newspaper in quite the same way as the digital age is doing.

While in India…

Here in India, matters usually pan out differently. Technological utopians, usually fixated on the wonders of IT in their work places, tend to be delirious with the idea of social networking and the digital paper resurrecting moribund village India.

But what would the Net mean for a goat-herder tending to his flock in a remote part of Kashmir? A scrap of newspaper carried by a strong wind from a tourist camp near a stream blows his way, he stares at the fading 40-point bold headline rejoicing at the discovery of life on the moon and a question in his nerves is lit. He has had an epiphany and that will set him out on a journey of learning as knowledge.

Such an accidental spark could be kindled in a cybercafé in Srinagar; but the Net carries a flood of information and your mind and curiosity flirts with so many titillating worlds; soaking in information is not the same thing as seeking knowledge.

So, in India, newspapers will remain more important than the digital press. At least in the villages, even if the urban middle-class Indian “readers” would prefer to pick up their news off their mobiles.

Out in rural India, they will gather around the man reading them the news and a communitarian world will be renewed. The socialisation will reaffirm the idea of that ‘hard copy’ as a channel for human intercourse, of responses to something heard; not just from the news per se but from the timbre and tone of the “story-teller.”

The reader may throw the paper in disgust, spit on it; someone else can pick it up take it home and read by candlelight or kerosene lamp, tickling into motion a journey of self-discovery.

So is it with the classroom; the interaction with a teacher and a socialisation with other equally curious kids creates an atmosphere of discovery that is almost ineffable and yet so seductively real.

Of course, Indian classrooms may not be the best places to kindle curiosity; by the time the child enters university, the traumatised spirit has been replaced by the lure of market opportunism. But the technicist-utopian idea of replacing human frailties, perversions and cruelties by the efficient impersonality of distance education, now made more efficient by spectrum upgrades, will not generate a spirit of knowledge seeking that comes with human interaction. After all, on-campus primary and higher education is a huge business in India.

The perverse dream

So, the digitised world’s disruptive qualities may not quite pan out in India as it has in the US. But Christensen’s novel and insightful concept of “disruptive innovation” embodied by the digital age is alive and working in India with paradoxical effects. It is dividing India into two distinct worlds; one in which Information Technology and its larger context of digitisation will increase work-place productivity so that urban India or parts of it will become more advanced.

Think of India’s faux Silicon Valleys as WiFi-ed islands of high profitability, high product and services-refinements, clients to Christensen’s “sustained innovation”, a world of mutual exclusivity and dystopian individualism.

The rest, the bottom really, will be the unemployed, the undigitised, that “demographic dividend” more socialised and so much more angry, nursing their inchoate claims, waiting for the main chance — waiting for the next “disruptive innovation.”

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