Sparking India – from Rote and Jugaad to Creativity and Innovation

As India embarks on an aggressive development journey with initiatives like Make in India, Startup India, Smart Cities, to boost growth in the economy and propel India to greater heights yet unforeseen, the roles of creativity and innovation become more important than ever. Interestingly, at the World Economic Forum, creativity has moved to Rank 3 in the list of top skills needed for employability in 2020.

It is worthwhile to review the progress that entrepreneurship and innovation have made in the country, as India strives to become a robust business economy. No doubt that India is witnessing an explosive boom in the startup ecosystem and entrepreneurship is an attractive glamour option today. There has been a flurry of startups in various sectors including eCommerce, education, mobile, to name a few. The traditional big players too have been experimenting with different ideas.

In highly volatile global environment of today, innovation has all but become a necessary differentiator, regardless of market size of company. Innovation is the defining competitive edge and, is turning to be the key to entrepreneurship now. This is where creativity becomes important as it is the starting point for innovation.

With the recent announcements in Indian Budget 2016 laying emphasis on entrepreneurship to boost jobs and investments, many incentives are being provided to encourage entrepreneurs to start new firms that are not inspired by traditional businesses, and thereby build an economy driven by technology.

Does India have the necessary ecosystem to build enterprises capable of inventing really brilliant and world-class products?

Do we have the skills to generate practical and out-of-box solutions to business problems?

Creativity in Indian entrepreneurship
Creativity is a process which needs to be nurtured. It is not possible to instil creativity in a day. Creativity is required continually to improve ideas and solutions, by making gradual alterations and refinements to existing work. Innovation happens as a result of implementation of creative ideas. Contrary to the myth regarding creativity, very few products of creative excellence are produced with a single stroke of brilliance or in a frenzy of rapid activity or an Eureka moment of a genius or a stroke of serendipity. Much closer to the real truth are stories of inventions where the creators would keep tweaking their products, always trying to make it a little better. Creativity driven innovation provides value to customer’s satisfaction thereby delighting the customer. In fact, creativity is at the core of the spirit of innovation. Creativity and innovation therefore, trigger and propel first-rate entrepreneurship in a country. Anticipating the needs of the market, offering additional quality or services, maintaining organizational efficiency, and keeping costs under control are prominent drivers of innovation in today’s highly volatile economic environment. Original thinking, adaptability, out of box ideas, alternative approaches, challenging the status quo, doing existing things in extraordinary ways are some of essential attributes required in entrepreneurship today . Successful entrepreneurs are the “dreamers”, who take hands on responsibility for creating innovation derived from a combination of a creative idea coupled with a superior capacity for execution. As entrepreneurship takes centerstage in India today, the need for creativity becomes even more relevant.

How  creative are Indians ?
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, during his visit to India last year , emphasized on the need for creativity in Indian education system. He re-iterated that India could reward risk-taking more and, perhaps, its education system could emphasize more on creativity. As part of Pichai’s visit, Google announced a programme to train two million Android developers over the next three years by working closely with over 30 universities. “I think creativity is an important attribute. Today, the country values academic knowledge over creativity. In USA, learning is very experiential, people learn to do stuff by doing them. It is important to allow that kind of system, where there is creativity and people learn to do things. It is also important to teach students to take risks,” he said.

Is the Indian ecosystem conducive to a culture of creativity?

Let's take a sneak peek at the Indian education system.
On the academic front, students in the schools of our country, including the top league exhibit rote learning. Learning by memorization based on repetition to help quickly recall the meaning of any material, is the preferred procedure followed by most. This has worked wonders here as it is a quick and easy method to answering questions that require straightforward use of techniques or learnt procedures. Additionally, this also leads to misconceptions developed by students which persist without being corrected. However, the students are satisfied as they are rewarded with good numbers and lucrative jobs with less labour.

What is the impact of the existing Indian system in the nation’s context?

How is the lack of conceptual thinking going to impact the future of Indian adult?
The lack of analytical thinking, due to rote learning does not allow students to develop higher order thinking skills such as critical thinking, creativity and application, resulting in non-rational thinking and the inability to discriminate between right or wrong.

Creativity as a culture!
Transition from rote-learning to a creative-based education is vital if India envisages becoming a global business leader. A creativity -based pedagogy is the need of the hour to take entrepreneurship to next level in India. Analytical based learning devoid of herd mentality can assist india to transition from a status of great followers to a prominent leadership role in the global scene. Emphasis on actual knowledge and learning rather than academic feats is of utmost importance.

India is witnessing some efforts in this direction in the form of Jugaad. Companies in India are adopting Jugaad as low-cost, improvised innovative fixes or simple workarounds, to make existing things work or to create new things with meagre resources. Well, this can best be an acceptable form of frugal engineering at its peak.

But is Jugaad in India synonymous with innovation?Are Indians truly innovative?

Jugaad is a very restricted form of innovation as it is about finding ways to fix problems, while innovation is about creating something new. While Jugaad is focused on the short term bounded by constraints(money, time or man power) in adverse conditions like recession or developing economies, innovation is more long term and unbounded. Internet, smartphone, television,etc. are excellent products of innovation. Reva, India’s first electrically powered car is a classic example of innovation in the country Jugaad has has been successful in the Indian environment and its constraints.

However, Jugaad has its limitations in terms of scalability and alignment with today’s global marketplace. As the next step, India needs to go for creative innovation ecosystem, which offer customers well-engineered products and services for a smooth and integrated customer experience, if India desires to compete with global innovation leaders like US, Switzerland,  United Kingdom, Sweden,  Netherlands, Japan, Germany and Israel.

Successful innovation involves connecting ideas to the market. While innovation certainly involves costs, it is worthwhile to pause and ponder about the perils of not innovating. Nokia is a good example in this context, as it tried to follow the smartphone dream. Far from being the leader of the smartphone business, today it is struggling to catch up with Apple and Samsung.

While Indian government strives to empower entrepreneurship and ease entry barriers, it becomes all the more relevant for skill-enabling Indians with creativity-focused education to open new avenues for the unemployed and strengthen the Indian economy. Moving from a mindset of job seekers to that of .job creators will need a cultural transition from rote learning to creativity focused education. Indian entrepreneurship could then get a re-vitalizing push to scale to greater heights.

As India targets to be a fast-growing country, instilling creativity right from the grassroots will pay rich dividends. On the way forward, this can trigger Indian companies to build an ethos of developing products to solve problems for humanity.The Indian dream of being a global leader turned to reality.

Needless to say, India has immense potential because of its huge scale. Sparking minds is the new mantra!