Arun Shourie speaks on Innovation at Robert H Smith Business School, University of Maryland

He addressed a diverse audience consisting of students, faculty and working professionals from Washington DC area. The main theme of the evening was to highlight bottom-up approaches to innovation in finding localized solutions to address Indias indigenous needs. He structured his talk around a few basic premises targeting the impetus for growth in India.

He was delivering the talk on the invitation from Center of International Business Education and Research.

Talking about innovation, Dr Shourie said, Getting through a day requires a lot of innovation in India. He made a mention of Dr Anil Gupta from IIM Ahmadabad who runs a project to identify such real time solutions employed by Indian farmers to address their daily problems. For example, new seed varieties or indigenous solutions to deal with pests. He laid emphasis on the effects such simple solutions can have to improve the quality of our life. Most of these skills should be transmitted through the society by means of traditional apprenticeship. Moreover the society has to be willing to adopt this change and communicate it to others.

Dr Shourie also addressed the lack of institutional innovation in India. In the current scenario we adopt global solutions to address our local problems, said Dr Shourie. The government sector has been inefficient in terms of encouraging innovation. The current government culture has been geo-politicizing, hence detrimental, to Indias development in the R&D sector. He stated that the international sanctions imposed on India have had a positive effect in terms of growth in the R&D sector by compelling India to develop its own technology. A classic example of this would be the indigenously developed Kaveri engine for the LCA (Tejas) project.

In recent years the large talent pool in India has attracted foreign investment in the R&D sector. Many MNCs are contracting research to India, a classic example of which would be HP. This has affected the growth of Indian industries to compete in the global market. Indian company, Moser Baer operates state of the art manufacturing units in Noida, UP and is the worlds 2nd largest optical storage media manufacturer.

Dr Shourie also denounced the stereotype that India is the worlds support center and China is the worlds manufacturing hub. He stated that the current frontier in Indias development is fuelled by knowledge driven companies.
At the end of the talk Dr Shourie answered questions raised by the audience. He also advised students on how to approach innovation strategies to address Indias local and national requirements.