Inclusive Innovation Series: Stories Across the Ecosystem — Field Notes from India with Professor Anil Gupta
In this #InclusiveInnovation Series: Stories Across the Ecosystem, we are building upon the research frameworks lifted from our UNDP-Nesta ‘Strategies for Supporting Inclusive Innovation: Insights from South East Asia” Report. For more context you can see a quick background on ‘The Why’, implications in the COVID19 era, and the full launch details plus report and recording here. Previous Field Notes Posts covered Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia.
In this post, Anil Gupta, a prolific profile in the space of Grassroots Innovation and founder of the Honey Bee Network, GIAN, Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions (SRISTI), shares perspective and insight into the latest happening on the ground. He is also currently delivering a “Mapping Inclusive Solutions for Social Transformation” MOOC for the UNDP Global Accelerator Lab network. He is interviewed by Courtney Savie Lawrence of the UNDP Asia Pacific Regional Innovation Center Team.
Courtney- RIC: for those following ‘inclusive innovation’ in Asia, your work is relatively known- in fact, you have been building ecosystems for the past few decades, from influencing policy craft to platforms that champion ‘grassroots innovation’. Anyone following you on twitter will see a stream of lead user innovation examples; and sometimes you chime in on the policy side of the equation. Can you share with us more on the latter?
Professor Gupta - Honey Bee Network/GIAN/SRISTI: There are several initiatives in the Science Technology and Innovation Policy space in India. Recently the government has initiated large scale consultations involving diverse stakeholder groups. The STI policy released by the government in 2013 provided the much needed breakthrough as it facilitated dialogue among diverse groups across the vast STI domain, and this helped in developing a coherent voice towards creating a robust STI ecosystem in the country for inclusive development of the country.
Earlier, the focus on innovation was there in the form of public policies formulated by various ministries, but with the advent of the Honey Bee Network in 1988–89, the focus started becoming sharper. Lately, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, Professor K VijayRaghavan, and Secretary DST Professor Ashutosh Sharma, have launched wider consultations (on June 12, 2020) for the formulation of a Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP). Several changes have recently been taken up, for instance, innovative public procurement related policies, numerous incentives for start-ups to promote youth entrepreneurship, policies for promoting women entrepreneurship and so on. Establishment of the Atal Innovation Mission by Niti Aayog has given further fillip to these efforts. With the help of the Honey Bee Network, a Festival of Innovation (FOIN) was hosted by the Office of the President of India (2015–2017) and earlier exhibitions of innovation were hosted for over five years. The current President Shri Ram Nath Kovind ji gave a new impetus to these festivals by making the Festival of Innovation and Entrepreneurship ( FINE), implemented through NIF in different parts of the country.
In addition, the Honey Bee Network has triggered several other initiatives including an exhibition of technological, cultural, educational and institutional innovations at the President’s house during 2015–2017. During the thirteenth Finance Commission, the Network also helped in the setting up of a District Innovation Fund, comprised of more than a million and half dollars in each of the 650,000 districts of India. This is a decentralized, diversified and distributed model of creating an inclusive innovation ecosystem.
Courtney- RIC: Thanks for sharing some interesting details in terms of India’s innovation landscape. I want to get your perspective also on the opportunity space upstream. For example, just last year there was the Workshop on Policies to Support Grassroots Innovation; this later evolved and was featured in another set of regional policy dialogues- the Asia-Pacific Innovation Forum. Although strong recommendations emerged from both series, what challenges still remain?
Professor Gupta - Honey Bee Network/GIAN/SRISTI: It may be recalled that GIAN was the first Grassroots Innovation incubator in the world, set up in 1997 in collaboration with Gujarat state government, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and SRISTI, as a part of the Honey Bee Network. Learning from the HBN experience, there are a few things that should be taken up globally- overcoming inertia is one of them. For example, four million people die each year because of indoor air pollution -look at it this way- even with 3 billion people around the world affected, out of which 4 million die, you would expect that the new designs of stoves would have been developed by now for fuelwood based cooking. [Imagine that with a different design] you double the current combustion efficiency (around 15 per cent), and people go half the distance or time it takes to cook food, besides having cleaner air. This is a serious problem. How many innovations have we had about this and with what degree of urgency? There are many such problems which have remained unsolved for hundreds of years if not more. The rhetoric of public policy and innovation falls short. Even if a few designs are developed, these are not affordable enough and have not diffused much. It is in such cases that the grassroots innovations matter. There are many designs of stoves that need large scale testing, decentralized production and diffusion both as DIY designs and low cost, locally fabricated solutions. This is not possible often without active public policy support. These technologies exist and many are becoming popular, DIY, hundreds of practices; so long as public policy doesn’t inhibit the diffusion of these technologies, so long as it can be shared and people can use, it’s fine.
Yet the problem is also a matter of structure and scale. There is no single program to test and diffuse grassroots innovations at a large scale. How do we deal with this paradox? Surely when the cost of failure is low, we should try. The functional traditional knowledge (TK) of one place may be an innovation in another place. So the functional and viable TK should not be neglected either.
So if you really ask me, negligence is not just at national level, it’s also at the international level. However, the UNDP Accelerator Labs are the first large scale effort with a sincere focused attempt to map, experiment and scale innovations based on local solution for and by the grassroots, I am sure this is the first historically large scale attempt; we have not had such an attempt in UN history that I can recall.
What is also missing in the innovation ecosystem? You have support available for innovations, you have support for small entrepreneurship, but when it comes to grassroots innovation then it comes to testing and procurement — even today public procurement of grassroots innovations is practically zero.
These innovations also need large scale validation data. For this kind of large scale testing of an idea no specific funding exists- we need to fill this funding gap globally. Otherwise, the existing pool of innovations will remain localized. It should also be kept in mind that we don’t have to diffuse only innovation, but perhaps more importantly, the principle underlying these innovation, or heuristics need to be replicated more widely. These heuristics can be used to trigger more experimentation across spatial, sectoral and social boundaries to trigger emergence of many more innovations.
At the same time, a good case of change is COVID19. In March we were importing 100% of our COVID19 test kits in India, in June we’re manufacturing half a million through distributed manufacturing, assured public procurement and rapid testing and regulatory approvals. How was it created? A platform, “National Biomedical Resource Indigenization Consortium (N-BRIC)” was created. No money was put on the table, yet they knew their kits would be procured. This is an example, from zero to 100% of public procurement as a leveraging vehicle for indigenous innovations in an extremely short period of time.
Courtney- RIC: Let’s zoom out and talk about innovation policy moving in the right ‘direction’. Can you tell us more about what this looks like in the context of India and other interesting things happening?
Professor Gupta - Honey Bee Network/GIAN/SRISTI: Let me give you a background of how the inclusive innovation ecosystem evolved three decades ago. India is probably the only country where the grassroots innovation system has become an [integrated] part of the National Innovation System. The mainstream media has also helped in creating wider awareness. To give a little background, when the Honey Bee Network started in 1988–89, there was hardly any discussion on innovations from ‘below’ in the country, or the world. The term ‘grassroots innovation’ had not been coined until then. SRISTI was set up in 1993 to further support to HBN. Five years later, in 1997, GIAN was set up as a follow up to the first International Conference On Creativity And Innovation At Grassroots (ICCIG) at IIMA. The experience of GIAN was scaled up in the form of the National Innovation Foundation in 2000 through the DST, and the Government of India, as an autonomous institution. It has since become an integrated part of Government. In 2003, we set up the first Micro Venture Innovation Fund (MVIF) in collaboration with SIDBI, the conceptual model for it was proposed at ICCIG. While Micro finance as an instrument for poverty alleviation is mainstreamed and is well known globally, the Micro Venture Innovation Fund, first proposed by HBN, is yet to become a globally pervasive instrument for promoting small innovations. There is no choice though. If big innovations need risk capital to grow, the small innovations will need the same even more. Transition from micro-finance to micro venture innovation finance will spur creativity even among women’s self-help groups. This transition can be delayed but not denied.
HBN has honoured the individual farmers, mechanics, artisans, pastorlists etc., through SRISTI and GIAN. After the NIF started awarding individual innovators, SRISTI started honouring outstanding volunteers, TK holders and community social change agents, conservators of biodiversity and so on. Later SRISTI also started awarding Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Award to young technology students in collaboration with BIRAC, the Department of Biotechnology in Life Sciences, and in other disciplines directly. In addition, the Ignited Mind Awards have been started now for children’s original creativity and innovations, in memory of former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. Likewise, another award has been started for parents, teachers and others so that they don’t send their ideas in the name of their children [through] HBNCRIIA (HBN Creativity and Inclusive Innovation Awards); and CSIR also gives awards to children innovators.
Other great developments include Dr A P J Abdul Kalam, the former president of our country, a very good friend, who started the tradition of Presidential awards for grassroots innovators. Three Presidents of India after him have continued this glorious tradition. There is also an ASEAN platform on inclusive innovation initiated by the Department of Science and Technology, the Government of India, in collaboration with ASEAN countries. Lastly, GIAN has signed an MOU with Telangana State to set up GIAN Telangana. This is a very major step where our experience of HBN is being replicated by state policy. We are exploring the possibility of setting up GIAN’s Golden triangle linking Innovation, Investment and Enterprise in several other states.
Courtney- RIC: As you have been famously headlined before, “Minds at the margins are not marginal minds”- what do you see happening in this space of inclusive innovation in the next 10 years? And do you have some ideas on what it will take for us to get there?
Professor Gupta - Honey Bee Network/GIAN/SRISTI: 2030 — India: I am an incorrigible optimist. So my first hope is that in most countries, that have interest in inclusive development, that they will pay attention to frugal innovations emerging from the grassroots, and also designed for the grassroots, in the next 3–4 years. The COVID induced economic slowdown will force most countries to look for Gandhian decentralized and diversified solutions for local development.
The concern for climate change (don’t forget that during the lockdown period, ecological healing took place very rapidly, though it may not last long, if old ways of using energy resume again) and environment will make circular economy solutions more popular. The knowledge intensive solutions will overtake material intensive solutions. The de-materialization of the economy will become a reality given material constraints. And that knowledge rich, economically poor [people] will not suffer as much as they do now. So, learn, listen and leverage people’s knowledge with or without blending it with the Institutional, scientific and technological knowledge. The download to upload ratio of knowledge will change. More knowledge will be shared openly than just consumed.
My next forecast is that the education systems and schools will stop neglecting innovations from ‘below’ in the textbooks. The leaders will realize that they cannot get creative solutions in society unless they start early. Further, schools will maintain ‘Local Knowledge Banks’. How to inspire young kids and people to take up this knowledge and share the benefits [gained through] grassroots innovators? We will need to build a respectful, responsible and reciprocal value system and culture. You may call it utopian, but that’s my dream. I also foresee emergence of a new social contracts globally. Ethical investors and entrepreneurs from different parts of the world will sign up with the innovators, and convert their ideas into enterprises with a fair share of the benefits. The GIAN’s golden triangle will happen not just at a local level but also at global level reversing the dominant model of globalization. G2G (grassroots to Global) will become a reality. Money from our pockets will go to grassroots communities when we buy what they make. That’s how- our impatience with inertia will grow and we will get collectively excited about inclusive innovations.
Let us know your thoughts — you can follow Anil Gupta and Courtney Savie Lawrence— and join us at the new open community of practice here on LinkedIn or this #InclusiveInnovation Twitter list.
If you are keen to contribute to the agenda, you can continue the conversation with UNDP Regional Innovation Center’s Head of Exploration, Courtney Savie Lawrence through LinkedIn here. Let us know more examples you see from the ecosystem, as we run the #InclusiveInnovation Series: Stories Across the Ecosystem.
