Innovation may be the toast of entrepreneurship everywhere, but how much are companies, small and big, engaging with it? Planning commission member Arun Maira believes innovation in India, even as the country completes the first quarter of its Innovation Decade, is caught in a two-way bind. Big firms, Maira said at a conference on social innovation, are cagey about experimenting or venturing out of the realm of the time-tested processes while small firms, though not lacking in appetite, are lacking in funds to get innovative.

The “Building Innovation Ecosystems for Mega Impact,” a conference on social innovation, technology and government, held at IIT Delhi, saw experts discussing the topic, and how technology has a big role to play in terms of creating social innovation opportunities.

Organised jointly by Action for India (AFI), the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) and the Centre for Innovations in Public Systems (CIPS), the daylong conference was chaired by Sam Pitroda, advisor to the prime minister and chairman of the national innovation council, former telecom secretary and incoming president at NASSCOM R Chandrasekhar, Maira, secretary of the department of electronics and information technology, J Satyanarayana, and Sanjay Jaju, secretary, department of information technology, communications, government of Andhra Pradesh. Desh Deshpande, founder of the Deshpande foundation, member on the board of MIT and advisor to the Barack Obama government was also in attendance.

Social innovation- the need of the hour  
Social innovation, at a small scale, is already taking place in the country. But, for a bigger impact, the scale has to vastly increase, Deshpande held.

“Innovation happens in lots of places. We need innovations to solve the problems and we need to do something different. Innovation typically emerges at a small scale, but to have a meaningful impact it needs to scale up. And the only way to scale it up is to encourage public private partnership and embrace innovation to impact millions of people,” he said, adding that for innovation to be effective, it has to address four areas — assessment, intervention, distribution and monitoring.

Maira said that the scaling up is only possible with small and medium social entrepreneurs.  “Small money available through venture capital is missing in the Indian ecosystem,” the planning commission member said, making a case for increased funding for innovation.

Further, it is not necessary that a model that is successful in one area will generate the same results elsewhere. Innovations cannot just be replicated. It has to be adapted.

“Why do we say scaling up, when we should be saying spreading around? That is really the more effective approach in India. We at the planning commission hear a lot about this from the states. One cannot just take a good idea and bring it to the attention of someone in power, in central government who will then try to get it implemented in a large scale. Social innovation, to be successful on the ground, cannot be franchised like a McDonalds. Regional adaptability is the key. Let’s adapt ideas to regions and communities, not simply replicate,” explained Maira. 

Maira pointed out that government intervention was not the solution to the problems involving social innovation.

Leveraging social innovation with technology
Technology bridges the gap between the problem and the solution in social innovations. The National Optical Fibre network is just one example of that. The network has so far connected 2.5 lakh village panchayats so far. “It has enhanced opportunities for social innovations,” said Chakrapani Dittakavi, director, CIPS.

Kantha Rao, former president and CEO, national e-governance division, DeitY, added that innovation is a trade-off between “reality and the best possible from technology.” In the context of the mission mode project, an initiative to take the national e-governance plan forward, Rao said that the infrastructure is being provided by the government but there are lots of gaps in terms of delivery. He further said that innovation could enable bridging of these gaps.
“Things like cloud computing and the app stores provide the space for social innovation,” he held.

Nasscom president-designate, R Chandrasekhar, spoke about the changes that the advent of technology has brought for entrepreneurs. He said that those who did not participate collaborate lost out on innovation.

Specifically talking about the IT department, he remarked that there were failures in terms of service delivery and that they needed to be attended to, to the micro detail, at the grassroot level.

In the recent context of the IT department, where several countries have set up protection barriers against the Indian IT sector, it was time that the India paid heed to the domestic market, the former telecom secretary said.

The Indian IT sector aspires to grow from a value of $100 billion to $300 billion by 2020. “This kind of growth is only possible through new innovations, where 70-75 percent of the revenue will be from services of products that do not exist today.”

“Today’s technologies have developed combinations that were not possible before,” he added.

Where will the money come from?
The question of funds is a big question that most of the social entrepreneurs invariably ask. In his talk, Sam Pitroda highlighted two such funds. The first was launched by the government to look at innovations at the bottom level while the second dealt with scaling up innovations.