Conference Background
India has been a historical source of science, invention and innovations. Perhaps as early as 300 BCE high quality steel was being produced in Southern India by the crucible technique. The precursor to the modern game of chess, Chaturanga, originated in India. The first prefabricated homes and movable structures were invented in 16th century India. Seamless celestial globes, one remarkable feat in metallurgy, originated in Kashmir, India. The country was among the originators for the Indigo dye used in dying fabric. Fibonacci numbers originated from early Sanskrit writings dating back to 200 BC. Cataract surgery was known to the Indian physician Sushruta from 6th century BCE. Prafulla Chandra Roy was the first scientist to synthesize ammonium nitrate in its purest form. Homi Bhabha, an Indian nuclear physicist performed the first calculation to determine the cross section of electron-positron scattering. There can be several such examples, including the Mahalanobis distance metric, the Raman effect, the Bose-Einstein statistics, among others.
Yet, in recent decades, India has fallen behind on innovation rankings published globally with several indices and metrics pointing to the country’s deteriorating innovation and scientific environment. The aim of the 1st India Conference on Innovation, Intellectual Property & Competition at IIM-Bangalore is to reinvigorate innovation conversations and re-ignite Schumpeterian forces of creative destruction in the Indian economy. There are a few glimmers of hope that add to this slowly building discussion. India’s Mars mission captured the global attention recently. With some 1300 start-ups from its alumni, the Indian Institutes of Technology were recently ranked ahead of Harvard University by a US based organization in spawning VC-backed start-ups. It is clear that a decade after signing the World Trade Organization mandated Trade Related Intellectual Property (IP) agreement, India is at the cusp of transitioning in its innovation, IP and competition environment. By bringing together innovation scholars, policy makers and practitioners from around the world and India, this conference intends to contribute to these emerging discourses around innovation happening in India and its transformative impact on long run Indian economic growth. In doing so, the conference also ambitions to provide momentum to recent policy mandates by Government of India around Create in India and Make in India.