Crafing Next Wave of Innovation

TOWARDS AN INDIA-DESIGNED WORLD

?When I woke-up to India

?On 10th December 1971, as I was celebrating my 5th birthday, India woke-up in me. The third Indo-Pak war is on. We live in Faridabad, a small town near India’s capital - Delhi. My mother is beside me and my sister who is 30 months old is sleeping in the room. A few days back my mother had put dark brown paper on all the windows of our flat – the first time I heard the phrase blackout. My father has not arrived from work; my mother is worried as we sit outside the house - on the balcony. It is cold – a December night. As we sit outside, my mother looks at the sky - and sure enough there are dots moving below the stars. These are aircraft moving, my mother tells me. She says, "These are Indian Air Force planes. We don't have Jets that Pakistan has, but our pilots are brave, and we will stop them". This is obvious reference to Sabre-Jets (F-86) that Pakistan had in 1971 acquired from US. India did not have these high-end fighter planes. But our Hunters and Gnats proved better. Morale was high and so was our training.

My father arrived on his bicycle a little late as he was buying a birthday cake for me. My memory of looking at the sky with dots moving below the stars and the fear in the air of a possible long war and my mother holding me - the young boy of 5 years - on the balcony of the Government flat in Faridabad is so vivid and clear even now. That was the moment I got hooked on to life-long quest and interest in India and Indian defence.

?India’s Survival – Principles of Robust Evolvability

Over the years, as I studied and connected more and more with my motherland, I realized the core strengths of India lies in its underlying philosophy of what Taleb recently coined as “Anti-Fragility” – an ability of an entity to gain more strength as it is stressed or harmed more. Iqbal wrote in 1904, in “saare jahan se achha” – indicating something unique and peculiar in India that has made India a longest surviving civilization and indeed the country,?

yūnān o misr o ruumā sab miT ga.e jahā? se / ab tak magar hai baaqī nām-o-nishā? hamārā / kuchh baat hai ki hastī miTtī nahī? hamārī?/ sadiyo? rahā hai dushman daur-e-zamā? hamārā

The underlying phenomenon of India one can claim is “robust evolvability”. A robust system doesn’t imply an unchanging system. In fact, robustness implies the ability to change in a manner that maintains the system function, sometimes evolving through creation of new functions by changing its components and mode of operation in a flexible manner. An adaptable structure is the key to responding to such perturbations. Robustness is a fundamental feature of living systems. Evolution requires robustness; natural systems, if they must evolve, need to be robust. However, robust systems face challenges of fragility and just-good-enough performance to function. To understand robustness, we need to look at stable states of a system. The stable state is the state of the system that maintains itself in specific environmental conditions. The fragility of system components or their chaotic nature may be balanced through higher level layers of minimum control and adaptation. If these controls are too tight, as say an optimal design, will make the system fragile when the context and environment changes. If the stable state is attacked by random changes that are unknown or unprecedented and the system moves to a new stable state without losing its key functionality, we can call the system robust. It may do so by re-arranging its system components, creating new system components, changing its mode of operation, or doing all the above. The key is to return to the previous stable state or move to a new stable state without compromising on its key functions. The stable states are called attractors in chaos theory.

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New World Family– Applying India’s Algorithm with Design Approaches

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The robust evolvability is the key architectural construct by India. India has the key mechanisms and principles to build robust-evolvability. In comparison to others, for example, West led by USA, has used a system design approach to design a nation with reliable components - almost like a perfect machine with perfect sub-systems. China is using "rapid-response" surgery of replacing/eliminating non-performing components - by continuously being on the guard and carrying and using its scalpel or dagger. Both these design principles are successful when the world is closer to being predictable or certain. In the environment of large-scale changes, evolution with robustness is the natural design principle. It requires diversity of components combined in loosely coupled operational principles.

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In India, we do not seek, as a nation, world power. The concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam “whole earth is my family or my home” is deep rooted. Nature of Indian democracy and to a great extent social and intellectual fabric of the country, is built on assimilation of variety. It’s amazing that such a large country builds, keeps on creating and assimilating so much variety in its systems and people. Multiple plans and initiatives in multiple dimensions might get created and executed with specific short-term objectives. If a particular response survives the mess and becomes a capability it will be foolhardy to attribute it to a shrewd design. We respond as a nation who is reactive, more accommodative to changes and hence has a greater chance of survival rather than a nation who design change in the world with the purpose of controlling the world - for example, US policy of "shaping the world" and Chinese objective of becoming a superpower - militarily.?

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Indian can, however, learn from China and US to start designing change in the world as well - rather than adapting to change. Here, one must clarify, this design is not for world dominance like the superpowers. As US is learning now and China will be forced to learn in a decade or so - the best way is to have largely an adaptive algorithm for the world as somehow India has demonstrated. But India needs to combine the adaptive algorithm that it has embedded in its DNA with a design algorithm to also create the change - that's what India should learn from declining US and rising China.

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Today, India finds itself possessing the largest youth population in this period of explosive global-scale churn. The revolutions in technology affairs, the world order shifts in geopolitical affairs, transformation in economic affairs, and rapid amalgamation of cultures are giving rise to unprecedented, unfathomable, and unconceivable threats, dangers, opportunities, insights, paths, and complexities. We need novel, inventive, and radical approaches to be created, explored, investigated, and designed. This period is an opportunity for India to redesign the world, provided we can discover, define, and conceptualize the most appropriate and resonant response - the Robust Evolvability Design.

?Author : Navneet Bhushan (Navneet) worked as a Scientist in DRDO from 1990-2000. He is founder director of CRAFITTI CONSULTING (www.crafitti.com) – an Innovation and Intellectual Property Consulting firm focused on co-crafting solutions for global problems. He regularly writes on defence, security technology and innovation. He is the principal author of Strategic Decision Making- Applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process published by Springer-Verlag, UK, as part of the Decision Engineering Series. Navneet Blogs at https://innovationcrafting.blogspot.com.He can be contacted at navneet(dot)bhushan(at) crafitti(dot)com