Last
week I participated in a fascinating seminar on “Nurturing, Managing and
Institutionalising Innovation” organized by DRDO. Among other things, this
seminar only reinforced my sense that….
Indians
are no less creative than others…
Every
time I listen to Professor Anil Gupta, he provides fresh evidence that people in
our country have a wealth of clever ideas. People in Meghalaya place shelves at
different heights above their stoves to cure wood and make other creative uses
of waste heat; a class one student in Tamil Nadu wondered why the suction
mechanism in the soles of his shoes could not be used to clean the floor,
resulting in his becoming India’s youngest patent holder; a school student in
Delhi designed a suitcase trolley that can be converted into a chair when you
have to wait in a railway station or bus stand; and an IIT Kanpur student has
designed a wheelchair that can go up and down stairs (see the picture below). We
have hundreds of such instances of individual creative ingenuity at its best,
cutting across region, gender, and age.
Anilji’s
talk reiterated what I have always felt – creativity, per se, is not a problem
in India.
But
is such creativity directed towards the right problems?
My
collaboration with Vinay Dabholkar in the last couple of years has highlighted the
importance of directing this creativity towards working on the right problems
if innovation in India is to have more impact. In the organizational context,
we have suggested building “challenge books” so that creative energy is directed
towards solving the “right” problems.
Of
course, this could happen serendipitously as well. In such a situation, the
challenge is to recognize the value of the idea you have spawned, and find ways
of taking that idea forward.
Impactful
Innovation: Dr. Arogyaswami Paulraj and MIMO
A
talk by Dr. A. Paulraj at the DRDO seminar highlighted the importance of
recognizing the value of “simple” ideas and pursuing them till others recognize
their value. (Dr. Paulraj’s experience also illustrates once again that Indians
ca n be among the most creative people in the world!)
Dr.
Paulraj has had a fascinating career – born in Pollachi in Tamil Nadu, he
started his career with the Indian Navy. Almost 40 years ago, he built a sonar
system for the Navy that was recognized among the world’s best sonar systems.
Later, he founded a DRDO lab (the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and
Robotics) and the Central Research Laboratory at Bharat Electronics Ltd.
For
most people, these achievements would have been good enough for one life! But,
in the early 1990s, Dr. Paulraj embarked on a new career as a professor at
Stanford University and made some fundamental contributions to modern wireless
communications that led to his being awarded the prestigious Alexander GrahamBell award of the IEEE.
Two companies he founded (later sold to Intel and
Broadcom respectively) were an integral part of this journey.
Dr.Paulraj’s most impactful idea was related to MIMO (multiple
input multiple output), a wireless technology that is at the heart of many
modern telecommunication systems including core 4G and 4G Wimax. According to wikipedia, “multiple-input and multiple-output, or MIMO, is the use of
multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver to improve communication
performance. It is one of several forms of smart antenna technology. MIMO technology has attracted attention in wireless
communications, because it offers significant increases in data throughput and
link range without additional bandwidth or increased transmit power. It
achieves this goal by spreading the same total transmit power over the antennas
to achieve an array gain that improves the spectral efficiency (more bits per
second per hertz of bandwidth) or to achieve a diversity gain that improves the
link reliability (reduced fading).”
Dr. Paulraj’s
Persistence
Dr. Paulraj described how, when he
first proposed the idea, it was questioned by others as it went against extant
paradigms in the field. In fact, when Stanford University first invited major
wireless companies for a discussion on possible licensing of the technology,
there were no takers as the companies believed the technology wouldn’t work. But
Dr. Paulraj persevered with the idea, and built his own start-up to demonstrate
its potential. It took close to 10 years for Iospan, the company he founded, to
establish the commercial viability of this technology. Vinay often talks about
the intense experimentation that is needed to take an idea to a demo (or proof
of concept) , and then from concept to the market. In this case, that process
took about ten years.
What
was particularly fascinating was how Dr. Paulraj, a newcomer to the field,
could make a major breakthrough within a few years of entering the field. This demonstrates
the power of coming into a field without pre-conceived notions or being seeped
in existing paradigms – you can think differently and originally, and question
existing dogmas and the so-called “received view.” But it certainly requires a
high level of self-confidence and self-belief to do so!
Can
such innovation be done in India?
Dr.
Paulraj wondered aloud whether what he has accomplished in the United States in
the last two decades could have been done in India. In a quick evaluation of
the Indian innovation ecosystem, he said that India is well placed on 3
dimensions – access to global knowledge on par with the rest of the world; a
large volume of talent; and increasing government support. He was particularly
appreciative of the talent available in India, and said that in his second
start-up (Beecem) MTechs from the Indian Institute of Science working out of
Bangalore were able to do as well as PhDs from the top universities in the
United States.
Dr.
Paulraj’s assessment of the challenge areas for innovation in India echoed what
we have found in our own work – culture, openness, teamwork, rewards, and role
models. He was particularly critical of the research culture in the higher
education system (he mentioned that though thousands of PhD theses have been
written in the MIMO area of which he is a pioneer, only around 5 of them are
from India). Industry’s ability to both do sophisticated innovation as well as
take it to the market is limited. And though there is more finance and risk funding available than before, it is still inadequate
for serious technology ventures. He related how the early funding of his two
start-ups (Iospan Wireless, Beceem Communivations) involved as much as $100
million in each round, sums of money that would be almost impossible to raise
in India.
India
has no presence in critical areas.
Dr.
Paulraj made a point that we continue to import several of what he called “mass
market” technologies (I would prefer to call them sophisticated technologies
that underlie most modern industrial infrastructure) like civil jets,
telecommunication, computers and precision instruments. (Pharma is the only comparable
area where we have a local capability of our own.) While we created a strong
technology base in telecommunications in the 1980s, we failed to build on this.
As a result, while we were well ahead of China in telecommunications at that
time, today we are nowhere while China has firms like Huwaei that are becoming
increasingly dominant in the telecom equipment space.
For
Dr. Paulraj, a telling sign of India’s abdication in these critical areas was
his experience at a premier trade show, the Consumer Electronics Show at Las
Vegas, earlier this month. Among the participants in the exhibition were more
than 2000 Chinese companies, more than a thousand from the United States,
around 800 from Europe, even 3-4 from Vietnam, but not a single firm from
India!
Dr.
Paulraj concluded by saying that we need willpower and imagination to change
this scenario. It seems to me that we also need to build our creative
confidence so that the Paulrajs living among us have the confidence to push
their ideas forward overcoming all odds.
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