People’s Festival of Innovation 2024
The People’s Festival of Innovation 2024 ( PFoI 2024), the third in the series being hosted by India International Centre, New Delhi is organized by GIAN and C-CAMP,Bengaluru.PfoI 2024, is a platform that catalyzes the convergence of deep-tech and grassroots innovations from across India, focusing on affordable and inclusive solutions for unmet social needs. The Festival brings together innovators, startups, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, domain area professionals, academicians, investors, and policymakers to discuss the success stories, challenges, and future trends for taking these innovations forward to address local and global challenges.
MESSAGE
Dr. Renu Swarup
The Festival this year is set to be a congregation of innovators, policymakers, industry experts, investors, and thought leaders who will collectively over five days showcase outstanding contributions , identify specific challenges faced in scaling these innovations, and successfully deploy these for addressing societal needs. It is a platform dedicated to showcasing the incredible strides that our country has made in the field of science-led innovation, especially in the biotech sector. The festival will not only spotlight high-tech, commercially viable innovations but also grassroots inventions addressing local issues and rural innovations that have had a profound impact on society. The Festival has two sections —an exhibition of about 100 Innovations displayed through Posters and Live Exhibits. A number of specially curated Panel Discussions which bring together experts from industry and academia,innovators, policymakers, and other stakeholders will discuss the challenges and opportunities for scaling innovations.
MESSAGE
Prof. Anil Gupta
The role of grassroots innovations in inclusive development is well recognised around the world.Both innovations from and for grassroots have a role to play in making the inclusive innovations ecosystem more
robust and rich. However, an experiment that has been going on for last three years signifies a new dimension of ecosystem enrichment. Thanks
to the partnership between C-camp and GIAN, innovations from deep tech and grassroots having brought together at People’s Festival of Innovation (PFoI) hosted by India International Centre, New Delhi. It is hoped that deep tech innovators will get inspired by extremely affordable solutions developed by grassroots innovators very frugally. At the same time, it is expected that some of the deep tech innovators might find grassroots innovators as partners for exploring a synergy at the field level. Grassroots innovators can test their solutions at the community level and give feedback particularly from some of the most economically marginal environments. There is also a possibility that some of the young grassroots innovators may like to learn the art of
scaling up and finishing the solutions from the deep tech innovators.
MESSAGE
Dr. Swati Basu
Over the last decade, India has laid emphasis on innovation as a growth strategy. As a result of this, there is a continuous improvement in its ‘World Innovation Index’ ranking. Innovation creates growth in the society by addressing its diverse challenges and in the process changes lives.
The focus of the current year’s festival of innovation is on the affordable, inclusive and accessible innovations impacting the society by seamlessly addressing the local and global challenges. More
intense interactions with investors and mentors along with engagement with policy makers and collaboration with technical experts will pave the
path for developing roust innovator accelerators that was initiated since the last year’s festival of innovation.
MESSAGE
Dr Taslimarif Saiyed
The criticality of such a festival lies in creating opportunities for a showcasing of emerging technologies, grassroots and deep-science to stakeholders across the innovation value chain including laypersons like you and me, businesses, channel partners, investors, philanthropies, international partners and finally the public service systems. The hope is to foster cross-talks across specialties and disciplines that have historically ignited ideas for out-of-the-box innovation thinking whether in knowledge, technology or process development in the
journey of idea-to-market.
The crux of People’s Festival of Innovations as the mentors and organizers see it lies in understanding that the scope for problem-solving is not necessarily confined to the higher echelons of scientific research, that grassroots innovations with more immediate impact may solve problems on the ground faster. At the same time we deeply appreciate that cutting-edge progress and state-of-the-art scientific advancements catalyze pathbreaking impact on the long run, changing how we work, live and coexist. The confluence of both of these is the uniqueness of PFoI.
