Innovation with a Conscience

While countless companies and individuals today proclaim their technologies,

products, services - and themselves as 'innovative', the nature of innovation,

and the inherent definition  of  innovation  has changed today from what it was

in the past. It is no longer individuals toiling in a laboratory, hoping to come

up with some earth shattering invention. It is not about one individual anymore.

Research today is about a bunch of focused individuals.  It is

multidisciplinary, global and collaborative. It has more to do with innovation

than research. Innovation is much more than just invention. In the world we live

in, it is more about services, processes, business models or even cultural

innovation which is more than just product innovation. I believe that innovation

begins at the intersection point of invention and business insight — and is made

valid only when it results in significant business and societal value.

Dr Guruduth Banavar, Director, IBM India Research Laboratory on the present and expected future of research and innovation. He stresses on the need for conscious responsibility and feeding back to the technology ecosystem.

Using Information technology systems to contribute to a larger goal of

empowering individuals who live in a society, and aid them in simplifying their

processes — routine and unexpected — should ideally be the broad objective of

research. In simpler words, the benefits of research and innovation in IT should

be relished by the entire ecosystem, and not a select sect. This in turn brings

to the surface innovations that are currently happening and should happen more

in the areas of state-of-the-art healthcare, disaster management, tools for

providing better insights into business processes— the list goes on.

From an Indian standpoint, the use of local languages to bridge the so called

digital divide, help government and policy makers to predict, prepare and gear

up against natural calamities, streamline processes related to better

healthcare, are ideal starting points for research with innovation as the

backbone. This does not necessarily mean a 'third world' or 'emerging economy'

treatment to research and innovation for India. Since corporate India is

sufficiently exposed to international business processes, technologies and

philosophies, we need also to ensure that research is streamlined in the area of

building resilient and tamper-proof enterprises, agile and failure-free

technology infrastructure, besides leveraging the superior blanket reach of

mobile technologies, to strengthen and optimize mobile resources in order to

innovate technologies and applications that serve the needs and interests of the

broader ecosystem.

In a sense, this goes back to the classical definition of research and

development that it should complete the cycle and give back to the ecosystem a

complete product, the development of which used raw materials from the same

ecosystem. With regard to IT, if somebody is doing research on speech

recognition, real-life samples, accents, and languages are captured and worked

upon in order to create a product. But the innovation cycle is not complete

unless the final result can be seen, heard or felt by that man's voice whose

samples were used. So much said, this consciousness has already taken place to a

certain extent, and companies around the world have realized the need to

constructively streamline their innovation in this way. What we need in the

months to come is to keep our eyes, ears and senses open so we can fine tune

innovations that are currently underway, to meet the needs of a changing,

evolving and exciting ecosystem out there. Hope the year ahead is filled with

all of these and more.