'India Inc must be receptive to ideas - big or small'

Ideas, however small, must get an interested audience, and Indian corporates should broaden their horizon and back game-changing ideas, says Lakshmi Pratury, host and curator of the INK Talks.

INK Talks, which got underway in Goa on Friday, is an inspired Indian version of globally popular TED Talks -- a platform that spreads ideas usually through short, powerful talks.

"For us, every idea is interesting, however small or big it may be. It could be someone making pots and pans and refrigerators of mud, or it could be someone improving the efficiency of somebody, who is weaving a Sari. First of all, we need to be open to ideas, however small they are," Pratury told IANS.

Over 75 speakers -- CEOs, entrepreneurs, artists, technologists and scientists, amongst others -- are scheduled to speak at the INK Talk event during the ongoing 'INK Live 2016'.

INK Live 2016 is being held at the Goa Institute of Management (GIM), the state's top B-school, where over 300 young people are scheduled to participate in a variety of workshops and interactive experiences, Pratury said.

The contribution of such ideas, she feels, is that they "open up the imagination of the people to an innovative world" and facilitate sharing of game-changing ideas as well as accelerate them.

Pratury was the co-host of the first TED India talks and the concept inspired her to set up INK Talks, to serve as a platform for sharing ideas from India and Asia.

"We are talking a lot to the younger market. We have partnered with Manipal University where we do something known as 'Teenovators', where we find teenage innovators in schools and give them a platform to pursue their dreams. There is a need for a lot of activities that allow us to tell our stories," she said.

The theme for this year's seventh edition of INK Talks is 'Kaleidoscope', which she says helps weave together patterns, however disparate.

"Very often, different pieces, which don't make sense, may seem broken...they may seem out of tune. But, they all have to come together to make a great pattern, and that's why we chose the theme of Kaleidoscope," she said.

Some of the speakers at the event are Sarvesh Shahi, a 24-year-old CEO of Zorba Renaissance Studios and co-founder of a marketing communications company 'Take Off'; restaurateur Sameer Seth; Kalyani Khona, founder of Inclov, a matchmaking app for people with disabilities; Meenakshi Raghavan, a 75-year-old Kalaripayattu professional; Aditi Gupta, founder of Menstrupedia; and Amitabh Kant, CEO Niti Ayog, among lot many others.

But while ideas are important, she observed, most of the Indian corporates are still finding it difficult to come to terms with the significance of idea propagation concepts, without looking for obvious commercial linkages.

"In India, the corporates are still at a formative stage. A lot of corporates look at if they can get some connection here that can help them sell their products or if they can talk about their product. What we say, in return, is that we are moving into a new era where our next generation is not interested in product features, but in what do you stand for, whether you are polluting the world, etc.," she says, adding such events are also about changing the way the corporate world communicates.

--IANS

maya/nir