Back ground

A splendid economic growth and a rising socio-economic disparity characterize the dichotomous story of India. Sustaining the growth, while ensuring equitable development, hinges on inclusive innovations and pervasive entrepreneurship. The country’s major challenge today is not only how to foster more inclusive innovations, but also how to unleash the potential of many innovations through tangible products and services that address the local needs of the society. This calls for evolving a unique and homegrown innovation ecosystem that promotes and enables value realization from indigenous research, inventions and innovations. In doing so it would be grossly mistaken to assume that a strategic approach merely based on the best practices from other developed and emerging countries could be transplanted to the Indian context. The need for the country to reinvent itself and build its own unique model of innovation is both critical and urgent.

As a first step it is imperative to assess the India’s existing environment in the context of its conduciveness for enabling transformation of indigenous scientific and technological research into useful social and commercial outcomes. An analysis of the knowledge creation, knowledge dissemination and knowledge application subsystems, in particular the focus and potential of public funded research, R&D spending and absorption capacity of domestic enterprises, technology commercialization landscape in the academia, challenges of scaling up grassroots innovations and access to finance for early stage technology development, is essential. This will lay the groundwork for identifying the missing elements and building blocks of, and holistic actions needed for creating the enabling ecosystem unique to India’s cultural and technological context.

STREAMLINE 2011 is an initiative in this direction with the overarching objective of understanding and facilitating creation of necessary linkages that enable “Research to Marketplace” transformation. The Symposium aims to deliberate on:

• How to incentivize and support researchers to create innovations that have potential for large outcomes,
  
• What support mechanisms are needed to encourage domestic SMEs to proactively harness R&D,
  
• How to promote inclusive innovations,
  
• How to promote, tap, protect, value-add and commercialize grassroots innovations,
  
• What new collaborative partnership models, new metrics and governance structures are needed, and lastly
  
• How to harness entrepreneurial skills to create affordable solutions based on indigenous innovations.