Global Innovation challenges-1: a call for creative connections with children, youth and women When any society learns to live with solvable problems by reinforcing inertia, indifference and also internalizing helplessness, then imagination gets stifled first. Once imagination gets constrained, innovations are unlikely to follow. UNICEF and SRISTI have joined hands to announce a global challenge…
When society gives big mandates to parties and social standpoints, it also expects magnanimity and inclusiveness in the same measure. I want to list some of the reforms that are crying for implementation in the larger institutional interest of an inclusive society. For a long time, we have been trying to universalise the benefits of food security,…
With the exorbitant hike in UK visa fees and Brexit, globalization got its first blow. With the transition in US government, a very big question mark has been put on the future of globalized world as it evolved so far. For all the apologists of uniform world economic order, and WTO, the movement of capital…
When the whole world looking at Indian renaissance as a sign of hope for pulling the global economy out of recession, the policy ambivalence is difficult to understand. In the year about to pass, several initiatives took shape. But a very few could get concretized. One good example is that of BIRAC [Biotechnology Industry Research…
Designing an empathetic start-up ecosystem needs an administrative culture that trusts young people and builds upon their creative ideas. It has to be flexible enough to adapt rules and regulations to match their aspirations without violating ethical norms of transparency and social accountability. Let me explain. There will always be some people who will not…
India has rightly embarked upon a very vibrant and supportive plan for encouraging startup enterprises to generate jobs and achieve socio economic growth. However, our analytic lenses are still biased towards IT based enterprises. Not that these are not important, but for them a reasonably robust ecosystem already exists. It is the manufacturing technology as…
How do we reshape electoral discourse: can we go beyond caste and communal agenda The election commission had to first time issue an advisory to all political parties to shun use of basal identities for invoking participation of people in the festival of democracy that is election. Why has discourse in the biggest democracy…
Creating innovation Playground When clouds do not rain: getting ready for the drought of innovations or a flood of creativity Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, then how are we missing the connections between wisdom that helps in deciding which ideas to choose and which not for taking these forward, even one’s…
Deification of Dr A P J Abdul Kalam legacy will be the greatest disservice to his memory. Having his statues on crossroads would not make him more venerated. We killed Gandhi, many times over by deifying him. I hope Dr Kalam will survive this tendency of making idols of people and forgetting…
There is a very welcome upsurge of entrepreneurial interest among the young people in the recent years. Several initiatives from universities, state and central governments and private sector have been taken to smoothen the journey from mind to market. There is a worldwide interest in the concept of frugal innovation which I proposed in early…