Innovation 101 – Rethinking Poverty: Affluence is not a prerequisite for creativity

“The minds on the margin are not marginal minds”. The most powerful statement I have heard in a long time. I urge everyone to watch this no-holds-barred TED video (opens in a new window) where Professor Anil Gupta, founder of the Honeybee Network makes point after point about grassroots innovation and how our great need for one-size-fits-all business models fall miserably short of what is needed.

Professor Anil Gupta, Founder - Honeybee Network

In his own words, here is how he started Honeybee

And one day — I don’t know what happened — while coming back from the office towards home, maybe I saw a honey bee, or it occurred to my mind, that if I could be like the honey bee, life would be wonderful. What the honey bee does: it pollinates, takes nectar from the flower, pollinates another flower, cross-pollinates. And when it takes the nectar, the flowers don’t feel shortchanged. In fact, they invite the honey bees through their colors. And the bees don’t keep all the honey for themselves. These are the three guiding principles of the Honey Bee Network — that whenever we learn something from people it must be shared with them in their language. They must not remain anonymous.

“They must not remain anonymous.” If you listen to the ‘silent’ pieces of his talk you hear frustration, helplessness, trauma, longing and urgency in equal measure. He espouses a fairness test that he first applies to himself before he preaches.

Professor Gupta, may your tribe increase!

Catalytic Innovation for cataclysmic social transformation

Two new words have entered the ever-growing repository of adjectives that are prefixed to INNOVATION – “reverse” and “catalytic”.

I have a problem with the word “Reverse” for its connotation; first we were called an underdeveloped nation, later to be euphemistically toned down to ‘developing’. (Reverse has to have originated in the West’s lexicon to mean backward – pun intended).  

Google Search for Reverse Innovation

Catalytic Innovation however, for me, has some very insightful and valuable realities attached to it.

Innovation 2.0 – US-based Indian invents clean power device

This moment pulled me back into the blogosphere … A proud moment for REC Trichy and the start of a new, clean age.

US-based Indian invents clean power device:

A team of Silicon Valley based technocrats, led by an Indian, K.R. Sridhar launched an energy server on Tuesday which they claimed could convert air and virtually any other fuel source into clean el…read more…

Let’s cut our noses. Yes Prime Minister!

Two of my favourite subjects here – the fascinating global warming debate and India’s bollywood style negotiation script. Hopenhagen is around the corner and will make Kyoto passe. We love being underdogs because like our movies, the hero comes from behind in a good-over-evil victory lap while the crowd applauds his heroic antics.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and I fully intend the pun.
US spews Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere when India sleeps. [Pat on back .. I'm getting good at puns]Now India wants America to pay for their long and sinful polluting behaviour. And guess what, if they don’t, we’ll have an equal right to kill the planet first so we’re even. That’s the craziest example of serving our self interests I’ve come across. It’s almost like saying that since I just found out that my neighbour has been raping my mother for 20 years, the way to punish him is by killing my own mother.

Uncapitalistic “Glacial” Innovation

Now this is innovation,

- disrputive, passion driven and socially responsible, sustainable & non-capitalistic - not what management gurus are touting.

Chewang Norphel, Director of the Leh Nutrition Project.

Glaciers are the sole source of fresh water for the Buddhist farmers who make up more than 70% of the population in this rugged range between Pakistan and China. But rising temperatures have seen the icy snow retreat by dozens of feet each year — to find evidence of global warming, the farmers simply have to glance up from their fields and see the rising patches of brown where, once, all was white. Knowing no alternative, they pray harder for rain and snow.

But Chewang Norphel has gone beyond prayer. The 73-year-old civil engineer has come up with a solution that won’t exactly save the ancient glaciers, but it could stave off a looming irrigation crisis.

Norphel has created artificial glaciers, frozen pools of glacier run-off perched above the farmers’ fields … [read the full article here].

Highlights:

1. His innovation has been hailed as an elegantly simple and cheap [I'd substitute this word by 'cost effective']solution to a devastating problem.
2. Only local materials are needed, and the villagers themselves can build and maintain them.

I’m so inspired …

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• Global warming shrinks glacier at alarming rate (telegraph.co.uk)