People’s Festival of Innovation 2022
People’s Festival of Innovation at IIC Delhi was co-organised by CCAMP, Bengaluru and GIAN, Ahmedabad, to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee year of the India International Centre, Delhi.
Innovation without people’s participation is development without impact, and any impact without people’s involvement is innovation without development.
Science, technology, and innovation have been key drivers of economic growth and societal development. Their impact has grown steadily and significantly in the last two decades, with innovation being the cornerstone of this growth. During the COVID pandemic, India’s emerging biotech innovation sector demonstrated its strong ability to address societal problems in India and beyond.
At the same time, numerous grassroots applications and designs emerged during the COVID-19 period, such as sanitizer dispensers, handwashing solutions, methods for teaching children without access to smartphones, and natural farming innovations given supply chain constraints.
Why People’s Festival of Innovations:
To showcase the strength of this strong Innovation ecosystem, a People’s Festival of
Innovation. — for the People, by the People and of the People is being organised by India International Centre, IIC Delhi in its Diamond Jubilee Year. This festival will showcase the significant strides India’s Science-based innovators have made besides the contribution of grassroots innovators in the past few years. It will help to seed connections between society and science that can usher in a new era for India’s inclusive socio-economic development.
IIC along with organizing partners CCAMP, Bangaluru and GIAN, Ahmedabad is bringing
together a high number of these socially relevant and high-impact innovations for public viewing through the ‘People’s Festival of innovation’. This event aims to celebrate these exciting and promising innovations along with their Innovators and promote societal engagement across all age groups with the foot soldiers of India’s growing biotechnology and inclusive -innovation ecosystem. The event is planned as a multi-pronged engagement initiative.
Objectives
a) To create wider awareness, in the 75th year of independence, about the emerging inclusive innovation ecosystem, including high-tech bio-enterprises and grassroots green innovations.
b) To help connect innovators across this spectrum so that mutual learning and collaboration take place. To link the frugality and groundedness of grassroots innovations with high-tech applications for social impact.
c) To expose young college and school students to a wide range of innovations and facilitate their interactions with innovators so that they aspire to be creative, innovative, and empathetic in addressing unmet social needs.
d) To connect investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and other important stakeholders with innovators to accelerate value chain development for wider social impact.
e) To identify opportunities for strengthening the inclusive innovation ecosystem further, making India more creative, collaborative, and compassionate.
Process
Fifty high-tech bio-entrepreneurs and fifty grassroots innovators displayed their innovations in slots of three to four days each. The posters of all 100 innovators were displayed in the exhibition hall for all ten days. Around 30-35 innovators showcased their prototypes around Gandhi Ground at IIC with a standee and a table to display small devices or prototypes. Designers were engaged in creating posters and other display and interaction materials.
Two panel discussions were held on November 21 and 22, alongside daily storytelling sessions. High-tech innovations were discussed on November 21, while grassroots innovations were explored on November 22. The purpose was to uncover lessons that could help policymakers support the emerging start-up ecosystem and scale up bottom-up grassroots innovations. While deep-tech and grassroots innovations are often seen as two dichotomous types of innovation, this festival ignited conversations on their commonalities and how they can complement each other in catalyzing societal growth.
Thus, the two broad themes of the festival included Deep-Tech Innovations and Grassroots Innovations addressing needs in Healthcare, COVID & Non-communicable Diseases, Agriculture & Animal Health, Farm Machinery, Natural Resource Management, Environment, and Clean Energy sectors.
The People’s Innovation Festival envisioned a two-fold outcome—first, spotlighting the rapidly evolving new technologies that could potentially define the future of society in India and abroad, and second, increasing public dialogue with the innovation community to inspire the next generation of innovators and problem solvers.
A delegation from the Philippines, comprising nine members under GRIND (Grassroots Innovations for Inclusive Development), attended the PFI from November 26-29, 2022.
PFI was not the endpoint of engagement with innovators. Six models of network entrepreneurship, developed by HBN and GIAN, reinforced collaboration rather than competition among innovation-based entrepreneurs. For instance, mutual franchisee, simultaneous collaboration and competition, alternate cycles of cooperation and competition, pooled catalogues, independent production, and combined marketing were explored with the participants in the exhibition.
