The Second Global Innovation Roundtable sets the agenda for global cooperation in Innovation

The National Innovation Council (NInC), chaired by Mr Sam Pitroda, Adviser to the Prime Minister, hosted the second Global Innovation Roundtable (GIR) on 1^st and 2nd November 2012 in New Delhi, India.

At the concluding session on ‘Collaboration on Innovation’, chaired by Mr Pitroda, numerous experiences, insights and ideas shared by the participants were galvanised and distilled and the collaboration opportunities in the following areas were discussed:

·         Open Government: The Platform already developed for this could be adopted by other countries, and India could help implement.

·         Crowdsourcing Innovation Platform: The Open Source Drug Discovery Platform developed by India for tuberculosis drug discovery could be used as a template for crowd sourcing in new areas of drug discovery.

·         Innovation for Education: Existing educational content could be aggregated, filtered and indexed, under the guidance of global domain experts and made available on mobile devices like “Aakash”

·         Innovation for Health: Health content could also be aggregated and made available, just like educational content. Further, India’s initiative for an Open Source Electronic health records system and tele-medicine could be adopted by other countries.

The National Innovation Council will now work with interested participants to take these ideas forward in aninstitutionalised manner to foster and develop collaborative projects.

For more details please see www.globalinnovationroundtable.gov.in

The Roundtable saw participation from heads of Innovation policy from 20 Governments across the world as well as leading global Innovation experts and aimed to create a global platform for sharing experiences, best practices and enabling collaborations. The key objective of the Roundtable was to explore the relatively less charted road of broad-basing innovations to meet key development challenges and develop a paradigm for inclusive innovation. The Roundtable also saw the presentation of the National Innovation Council’s annual ‘Report to the People’ 2012 to the Hon’ble President of India ShriPranab Mukherjee at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The Report outlined the initiatives and activities of the Council in the past year.

This GIR was a follow-on effort of the first Global Innovation Roundtable hosted by the National Innovation Council in 2011 which was very well received among the participating countries as a global platform for discussion and knowledge sharing.

Participants at the Roundtable included Ministerial level representatives from participating countries in Europe, the United States, United Kingdom, Africa; innovation experts from organisations such as Nesta, Innovation Norway, United Nations, the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation etc; private enterprises working for solutions aimed at the bottom of the economic pyramid; Ministers and policy makers from the Indian Government and members of the National Innovation Council.

Over the two days, the discussions in the Global Innovation Roundtable 2012 focused on a range of issues related to nurturing the innovation eco system and outlining deeper collaboration on innovation among nations. The work of the National Innovation Council in realising the ‘Decade of Innovation’ agenda of the Government was also shared with the participants. MrPitroda especially highlighted the Council’s commitment to inclusive development through its initiatives such as the India Inclusive Innovation Fund to finance enterprises at the Bottom of the economic pyramid; seeding innovation in regional SME clusters; efforts in nurturing innovation in the education system; and the Open Government Platform for placing Government data in the public domain. He also focused on the role of ICT in enhancing the innovation and development agenda and outlined the plans of the Government of India towards this end. The Government has created the National Knowledge Network, a high bandwidth network to connect all the educational and research institutions in India to drive multidisciplinary research and collaboration. This network has already connected 877 institutions. Plans are also underway to connect all 250,000Panchayats in the country to optic fibre based broadband to improve delivery of public services and provide locally relevant applications to empower rural citizens. Mr Pitroda highlighted that these ambitious projects provide an unprecedented platform for leveraging ICT to launch innovation in diverse sectors such as health, education, energy, agriculture and skill development. It also provides an opportunity for India to take the lead in shaping innovative collaborations and providing solutions for collective global challenges.

The Roundtable also focused on innovations focused on meeting the needs of inclusion, access and equity; and leveraging new tools and technology in the 21^st Century to scale and sustain innovative solutions. In this context, the sessions covered topics such as ‘Crowdsourcing Innovations’; ‘Financing Inclusive Innovation’; ‘Learning from Global Good Practices’; ‘Towards an Innovation Eco system’; ‘Innovations for the Bottom of the Economic Pyramid’; ‘Enhancing Productivity through Innovation in Clusters’; ‘Industry-Academia Interface for Driving Innovation’; ‘IPR and Innovation’; and ‘Innovations in Government’.

Source : Press Information Bureau