Kumar and Puranam study a new, more visible, consumer-oriented kind of innovation emerging in India of compact, low-cost, robust, and efficient products. New products such as Tata's Nano, Going Green's G-Wiz car, and GE's ECG machine exemplify this unique kind of Indian innovation which is marked by robustness.

What does innovation mean to and in India? What are the predominant areas of innovation for India, and under what situations do they succeed or fail? This book addresses these all-important questions arising within diverse Indian contexts: informal economy, low-cost settings, large business groups, entertainment and copyright-based industries, an evolving pharma sector, a poorly organized and appallingly underfunded public health system, social enterprises for the urban poor, and innovations for the millions. It explores the issues that promote and those that hinder the country’s rise as an innovation leader. The book’s balanced perspective on India's promises and failings makes it a valuable addition for those who believe that India's future banks heavily on its ability to leapfrog using innovation, as well as those sceptical of the Indian state's belief in the potential of private enterprise and innovation. It also provides critical insights on innovation in general, the most important of which being the highly context-specific, context-driven character of the innovation project.

"Examines the evolution of sectoral system of innovation in industries that are important to India's economic development"--

Dinesh C. Sharma is a New Delhi-based award-winning journalist and author with over thirty-five years’ of professional experience. He has written extensively on science and technology, climate change, health, environment and innovation for national and international media, including The Lancet and Wired. He has been Science Editor at Mail Today, and Managing Editor at India Science Wire and is currently the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow (2020-2021). His book The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution was awarded the Computer History Museum Book Prize in 2016. He has also been a visiting faculty at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Ateneo de Manila University, Manila. Dinesh Sharma tweets at @dineshcsharma

In 2010, India celebrated its 60th anniversary as an independent sovereign republic. India is the fourth largest economy by gross domestic product. Economically, it is building itself as a formidable force and global influence. At the same time India has fundamental challenges: its inequities are visible; its young population tread a thin line between opportunity and pitfall; its infrastructure has gaping holes; and it’s a slow chaotic democracy. This book establishes that in spite of these challenges, a new India is emerging out of the old, colliding more often than collaborating with the old India. Much of the new India is built on the economic momentum established 20 years ago and built by private entrepreneurs. The new economic climate, together with talent and entrepreneurship, is also making India a net supplier of innovation. Going by current trends, India will become an innovation super power by 2035. This book will establish that India is not just leveraging innovation for global competitiveness alone, but is also leveraging innovation as the specific instrument for inclusive growth. This book identifies gaps in the current innovation ecosystem and recommends a portfolio approach and calls for a National Innovation System (NIS) as a blueprint to fix the gaps. It suggests that for India to succeed in identifying, funding and sustaining a balanced innovation portfolio, India will also have to succeed in eliminating poverty, increase its rural GDP manifold, and provide employment, education and health for all its citizens.Click Here to view the official page for this title on Facebook. Establishes and analyses the trends that support India’s global emergence as an Innovation Superpower Identifies three critical levels of innovation namely grassroots innovation, national innovation and innovation for global competitiveness Recommends a portfolio approach as a blueprint for the creation of a National Innovation System

A vivid look at how India has developed the idea of entrepreneurial citizens as leaders mobilizing society and how people try to live that promise Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? In Chasing Innovation, Lilly Irani shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate. Irani documents the rise of "entrepreneurial citizenship" in India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class in one of the world’s fastest-growing nations. Drawing on her own professional experience as a Silicon Valley designer and nearly a decade of fieldwork following a Delhi design studio, Irani vividly chronicles the practices and mindsets that hold up professional design as the answer to the challenges of a country of more than one billion people, most of whom are poor. While discussions of entrepreneurial citizenship promise that Indian children can grow up to lead a nation aspiring to uplift the poor, in reality, social, economic, and political structures constrain whose enterprise, which hopes, and which needs can be seen as worthy of investment. In the process, Irani warns, powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies exploit citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope in the quest to generate economic value. Irani argues that the move to recast social change as innovation, with innovators as heroes, frames others—craftspeople, workers, and activists—as of lower value, or even dangers to entrepreneurial forms of development. With meticulous historical context and compelling stories, Chasing Innovation lays bare how long-standing power hierarchies such as class, caste, language, and colonialism continue to shape opportunity in a world where good ideas supposedly rule all.

Health-Care Solutions from a Distant Shore Health care in the United States and other nations is on a collision course with patient needs and economic reality. For more than a decade, leading thinkers, including Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen, have argued passionately for value-based health-care reform: replacing delivery based on volume and fee-for-service with competition based on value, as measured by patient outcomes per dollar spent. Though still a pipe dream here in the United States, this kind of value-based competition is already a reality--in India. Facing a giant population of poor, underserved people and a severe shortage of skills and capacity, some resourceful private enterprises have found a way to deliver high-quality health care, at ultra-low prices, to all patients who need it. This book shows how the innovations developed by these Indian exemplars are already being practiced by some far-sighted US providers--reversing the typical flow of innovation in the world. Govindarajan and Ramamurti, experts in the phenomenon of reverse innovation, reveal four pathways being used by health-care organizations in the United States to apply Indian-style principles to attack the exorbitant costs, uneven quality, and incomplete access to health care. With rich stories and detailed accounts of medical professionals who are putting these ideas into practice, this book shows how value-based delivery can be made to work in the United States. This "bottom-up" change doesn't require a grand plan out of Washington, DC, agreement between entrenched political parties, or coordination among all players in the health-care system. It needs entrepreneurs with innovative ideas about delivering value to patients. Reverse innovation has worked in other industries. We need it now in health care.