Global innovation frenzy: Can India match the pace of tech growth?

Flip through any academic journal, wade through an opinion piece on an online news site or its print cousin, or glance at a news headline and you see businesses claiming their innovative new product/service launch or governments proclaiming innovation-related investment or legislation. And you start wondering what all this frenzy about innovation is about.

When I query my business friends, they promptly reply that innovation is essential to help them differentiate their products or services from those of their competitors. When I query my friends involved in state- or national-level policy making, their prompt reply is that innovation is central to creating industries that drive economic growth and thus create jobs and grow gross domestic product (GDP). And come to think of it, the term “GDP”, which in my college days was perceived by all of us as something that only academics chant about, in today’s world appears to be as important even to the non-professional as India winning the world one-day cricket championship, or having an Indian girl being crowned as Miss World.

Then we read about United States-based companies like Google and Microsoft dominating the current hot topic of innovation, artificial intelligence (AI), and then you hear that these great innovator tech giants are led by Indians: Google by Sundar Pichai, Microsoft by Satya Nadella, IBM by Arvind Krishna, and, hold your breath, the White House Science and Technology Policy Committee by Arati Prabhakar … the list goes on and on.

India also has its share of both large tech companies and large national laboratories, but why is it that these don’t seem to be at the forefront of any innovation news headlines?

Even more bewildering is that all these Indian tech leaders in the United States and leaders heading Indian tech companies and labs, are all part of something we are all proud of: India’s merit-based education system, which ensures that in all fields, be it science, engineering, management or social sciences (to name a few fields), entry to the best colleges and institutes is based on an entrance exam system and is not based on family contacts and inheritance and paying hefty amounts.

Co-existing with all of the above is the oft-reported news that we, because of this extreme merit-based system, seem to be creating a generation of students/entrants who have mastered a system of besting entrance tests using rote learning (through training schools such as those in Kota) and thus are not good at the kind of original thinking that innovation requires?

Maybe we can learn from other countries, particularly ones that overwhelmingly lead in innovation, and for this there is no better place to start than the United States of America. As we all know, in our times, outfits from this country dominate the innovators of the business world (Google, Microsoft, etc) as well as the innovators of the educational world (Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, etc). What makes the 

US such a dominant player in the innovations of our time?

The answer to this is (hold your breath) a public institution called DARPA, the full form of which is Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration. DARPA is the institution that defined the technical challenge and funded, for example, the innovation behind Google’s original search algorithm. DARPA’s funding also laid the foundation for the creation and dominance of Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Cisco as well as Raytheon, Boeing, and more. A recent eye-catching one was the $600 million funding by DARPA of Amazon’s cloud-computing project. Incidentally, there are several of my left-leaning American friends who recount all this and say that this is why America needs to be at war all the time so that such funding will continue. But that is another story.

What makes me worry and perhaps you too, dear reader, is this: India also has its share of such large institutions like the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), which alone had an annual Budget allocation last year of $2.8 billion (Rs 23,000 crore) and a network of 52-plus laboratories spread all over India and employs more than 7,000 scientists. Why, then, does India not have world-leading technology companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon?

When I wandered through my friends and acquaintances with this same question, why is India not in the forefront of innovation, the wisest reply that I got, and unsurprisingly, from a friend who is a member one of India’s “business communities” was this: “It does not pay to innovate in India.” I immediately jumped on him: “Why is that so?” His answer: Indian companies, private or government-owned, think it is too risky to adopt a new innovative product or service.

In India, another friend says, a significant portion of research funding is government-led, particularly in sectors like defence, space, and energy. This can lead to bureaucratic inefficiencies and a slower adoption of cutting-edge technologies in the private sector. And, crucially, large Indian companies often prefer low-risk, service-oriented models over high-risk, high-reward innovation.

And, finally, India produces many highly skilled engineers and technical graduates, but many of them migrate to countries like the United States, where opportunities for tech innovation are greater, or they end up in the services sector domestically. The education system in India also tends to emphasise rote learning over creative problem-solving. Clearly, we have a lot on our hands if we set out to make India a more technologically innovative country!

The writer  (ajitb@rediffmail.com) is now devoted to understanding how technology is socially constructed