I attended Innovations 2008 (5-6th Jan 2008). An event organized by IIT Bombay Alumni association’s Pune chapter.The day started with Anand Deshpande talking about his ideas why product start-ups are not that successful in India and why are we not able to produce world class products.

The important points that he pointed out were we are weak in identifying product market space, product marketing and managing distribution channels.

He also referred to some good examples from the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W Chan Kim

This was followed by the talk from the keynote speaker for the event, Dr. R.A.Mashelkar. I was pleasantly surprised to know the contribution of Dr. Mashelkar in the field of innovation and there can be a separate blog just on that
He talked about some very interesting aspects of innovation and suggested that in Indian context innovation needs to happen at three different levels which is poor, middle class and rich. And there needs to be different strategies and different vision for each category of innovation to reach the correct segment.

One thing that really touched me was when he said this. ” I am sure India will definitely be an economic and technical superpower, what we also need to make sure is that we are super power in ethics and moral and guide the world with us. We need to think of the poor across the world and not just India and that will make true Indian super power”.

This followed by a session of show casing innovations. Interesting session where we saw innovations from various categories ranging from chemical, mechanical, bio-medicine, IT etc.

Well organized and discipline sessions was a pleasure to watch particularly in India.

I also got a glimpse of IIT way of starting and ending a function. The function began with singing a National Anthem (everybody actually sung it and no playback) and ending with something called Pasaydaan , which was unique and I would wish any Indian function should follow.