With “innovation” the watchword, China today is bent on pressing ahead with overall reforms. “To cross the river by feeling the stones” has proved a successful development approach which has conformed well to the country’s realities these past 25 years. However, challenges are mounting as the country deepens reform efforts to address many underlying and emerging institutional problems.

The robust growth of the US high-tech industries in recent years bears full testimony to the vital importance of a broad institutional framework to encourage innovation. China must speed up all-round innovation if it wants to shift from previous extensive growth at the expense of resources and environment to more efficient sustainable development.

But before innovation can take root in this country, policy-makers should do away with institutional obstacles in various forms.

For the complete story: China Daily, here.

It may look like black magic but there is a lot of discipline and thought behind innovation.

Leaving nothing to chance
Innovation is often associated with serendipity (the faculty of making happy discoveries by accident). The image of the scientist stumbling upon something at his lab, alone, is too anecdotal an approach to how innovation happens.
Shake up status quo
Innovation inherently focuses on disrupting the ecosystem. If not, it is an operational improvement. It is only when the status quo is shaken up that there are newer markets created or money to be made. The disruption could vary in its impact and in its visibility. An operational innovation is best done in an operational setting. Innovation has an element of risk to it.
Market pull vs technology push
A number of key market forces come together to cause the disruption that can enable one innovation or technology to surge forward.

For the complete article: The HinduBusiness Online, here.

This from Adam Bostock @ Acro Logic and the if++ The Innovation Forum http://www.acrologic.co.uk/if++/

Use this score card every few months, and plot the results on a graph. The Olympic Innovation Aim is to keep increasing all of the scores. The gradient of the graphs indicate how dynamic and innovative your organisation really is.

Note that each of the above items, hopefully, impacts on the next. More ideas lead to more products and, if done effectively and efficiently, this leads to increased profits. The organisation can use a proportion of these profits to improve working conditions and support the needs and desires of its staff. The resulting happy and relaxed work force will generate more high quality ideas, which gives more new products, more profits and more happiness, which . . .

Everyone’s had an idea just pop into their head, seemingly out of the blue. Ever wonder how that happens? Scientists are putting on their thinking caps to figure it out. Dan Steinberg, 18, is a study volunteer in a research project about insight.

“That’s this flash of inspiration when we’re trying to solve a problem, and you just don’t know the solution, you have no idea, you feel you’re stuck in a mental rut and then bang, the solution just pops into your head, seemingly from nowhere,” John Kounios Ph.D. said. But original ideas come from somewhere, the brain.

Insightfulness
Insight is the term used to describe a sudden, unexpected discovery, realization or understanding of a concept or problem. The first description of the phenomenon is attributed to Archimedes who shouted, “Eureka!” when he suddenly understood how to calculate density of an object by measuring water displacement. (According to legend, Archimedes had been taking a bath when the insightful solution came into his mind. He was so excited, he jumped out of the water and ran down the streets without stopping to dress.)

Insight differs from traditional problem solving. The most striking aspect of insight is the feeling of “eureka!” or “aha!” that accompanies the answer. Traditional problem solving involves a series of definable steps to gain the answer. With insight, a person has tried to come up with a solution for some time, and the problem or concept is deemed unsolvable. The answer suddenly appears out of thin air – often when a person is not even thinking about the problem.

Studying the Nature of Insight
The process of attaining insight is unknown because a person who experiences insight can’t tell how the answer was obtained (it just comes to them). Since insight can be an important way to solve a problem, it may be helpful to try to understand the brain processes associated with insight. Eventually, that information may be helpful in developing educational materials that instill insightful thinking as an additional way to learn and solve problems.

Researchers at Drexel and Northwestern Universities used brain scans to monitor how the brain works during insightful thinking. In one experiment, subjects were given a string of related words and asked to come up with a fourth related word (like pine, crab, sauce – answer: apple). During the test, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to monitor brain activity. Subjects were asked to respond whether the answer came to them through insight or some type of problem solving process. In a second experiment, new participants were given the same type of problem-solving test. This time, investigators used EEG recording to monitor brain wave activity.

The researchers found insight was associated with an increase in neural activity in an area of the right temporal lobe of the brain, called the anterior superior temporal gyrus. In addition, about 0.3 seconds before the moment of insight, participants experienced a burst of high-frequency electrical activity in the right half of the brain. That activity may indicate the “appearance” of the solution in the brain.

More work needs to be done; however, researchers may one day be able to develop methods that enhance or facilitate insight and increase problem-solving abilities. It may also be useful when traditional problem solving methods don’t help.

For complete article : News 14 Carolina, here.

Arindam Banerji has been writing a Guest Column on Rediff.com on “Can India produce billion-dollar innovation?” It is a four-part series and the fourth part will come out tomorrow, that is 13th August 2004. Some interesting portions are excerpted below – this is from parts I, II and III. I have also added the links to all the four parts in the end.

India has made rapid strides in the world of research and development in the last few years, but are its innovations world-beaters? In an era that has been dominated by American innovations, can Indian scientists and technologists make a lasting impression? What will it take to institutionalize innovation in India?

Bluntly speaking, Indian research and development has made tremendous progress over the last decade or so and the proof of this increasing Indian ingenuity is literally available in every sphere that you can think of. Clearly, I cannot go into every aspect of this, but let me at least try to delve into a few representative symptoms. . .

R&D Market Size: “R&D (research and development) outsourcing market for information technology in India is estimated to grow to $9.1 billion by 2010 from $1.3 billion in 2003, according to research agency Frost & Sullivan. The R&D outsourcing market for IT in India is estimated to grow from the present size of 1.3 billion dollars in 2003 to $9.1 billion in 2010 at a compounded annual growth rate of 32.05 per cent, Frost & Sullivan, which undertook the study for the department of IT, said in its report. The R&D outsourcing market for telecom in India is slated to grow from $0.7 billion in 2003 to $4.1 billion in 2010 at a CAGR of 28.73 per cent, it said.”- rediff.com

Earth-changing Innovations: “A research team at the National HIV Reference Centre in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences is developing a vaccine against HIV. The vaccine, called the HIV-1 DNA, has worked on mice and monkeys. The team led by Dr Pradeep Seth is now waiting for clearance to start clinical trials on humans.” — Hindustan Times
Disruptive Research: Outlook India has just published this excellent piece on some of the disruptive research that they found in various parts of India.

Institutionalized Innovation

Okay, so what is institutionalised innovation anyway — encouragement for innovation when embedded deep within key institutions of society allows for a steady stream of high-impact innovations like the Polaroid, cell-phone, Xerox machine, MEMs (micro-electromechanical systems) and so on — the hoops that innovators have to jump through to make a difference gets lowered.
You do not have to be one-in-a-billion to make a difference — being one-in-10-million is good enough. And those numbers make all the difference. It is this improvement of odds that forms the crux of ‘Institutionalisation of Innovation.’

So, ask yourself: would it take one Indian in a 100 million who could — while working in India — come up with something as earth-changing as the jet-engine? Or do you think it would take one Indian in a billion to achieve that feat?
Now ask yourself: what would it take to reduce the odds so that one Indian in 10 million could produce something fundamentally earth-changing like the photocopying machine?
How would we have to change as a society and as a country to reduce those odds of one in a billion Indians innovating the next radical shift in technology to, perhaps, one Indian in a 10 million achieving the same?

If you can figure out the changes, you have figured out how to institutionalise innovation. You have figured out what it takes not only to produce one good innovation every couple of decades, but to produce the kind of steady innovative disruptions that Tables 6-9 indicate.
Look closely, every few years within the US, somebody has come up with and produced an earth-shattering innovation or two. That does not happen by magic or coincidence and it isn’t because the Americans are any smarter than the Indians.
It’s because the US society, academia and industry have institutionalised innovation.

Rural and Indigenous Innovations
One style of innovation that really works in a country as large and diverse as ours, is grassroots innovation: this includes inventions for a milieu that is quintessentially Indian.
These inventions are probably difficult to migrate from our culture, traditions and environment to that of other countries, but they are critical to how Indian ingenuity can be directly used to transform our circumstances, in ways that elite corporate research laboratories never can.
These rural and indigenous innovations come from two sources: first, farmers, semi-literates, illiterates, slum-dwellers who have managed to change things by marrying their own innate genius to their inherent understanding of ground conditions; and, second, innovations taken from more traditional sources such as universities and independent engineers that are then adapted back to suit Indian traditions and conditions.

Academia-Industry alliances
A calculation by the Centre for Studies in Science Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, says 50 of India’s 250-odd universities are active in academia-business liaisons. The interaction between academia and business can take many forms — new start-up companies by academics, consultancies, joint ventures between commercial and academic organisations, and even ‘blue-skies’ projects that entail industry sponsorship of research in an area where the outcome is not clear.
Finishing school for Innovation: ‘NirmaLabs, an incubating initiative of Nirma Education and Research Foundation has established a fund of Rs 5 crore to support the incubation programmes. With a commitment of Rs 20 lakh per project as initial seed fund, the incubation programme enables participants to develop the concept further to a funding level. The programme is initially focusing on the IT, communication and entertainment sectors, with expansion in other sectors to soon follow. However, this is where this effort starts breaking off from other incubators.’
Co-ordinated research in strategic areas: Key strategic areas, where a national presence is required cannot be done in a handful of research labs or be looked into from a few angles only. One such area is the work on smart materials.

The fourth part talks about how to bridge the gaps between where India is as far as innovation is concerned and where it ought to be.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV