Curiosity Can Kill The CATs

To make a giant leap in the Global Innovation Index, institutions and faculty must do a serious rethink to cultivate curiosity among students

- SUDHIR VARADARAJAN

India, at present, is ranked 52nd in the Global Innovation Index. Policy-makers would like the country to leapfrog into the top 25 in the next few years. One of the visible signs of the policy initiatives, both in the academia and the industry, is the increased number and scale of innovation contests. Invariably, these contests target the engineering students, guided by an implicit assumption that young minds are better equipped to find creative solutions for the persistent problems faced by the industry and society.

Challenges

While innovation contests are not a bad idea, they have their limitations in producing innovation due to two reasons. First, it is difficult for students to produce radically new and practically feasible solutions without a deep appreciation of the problem’s context. In most cases, the solutions tend to be techno-centric in nature like IoT/Blockchain-enabled farming. Second, students whose ideas are not shortlisted, lose interest in the problems and the contests. As a result, the contests may not be the best tools to seed a culture of innovation.