India can learn from Israel by adapting bitzua, chutzpah, rosh gadol and davka

But our pundits will raise their finger that why should we k***f learn!!

R. Gopalakrishnan’s articles are always not only entertaining but are also more insightful with useful (useless) information. Consider his today’s article in ET. Of course, it is interesting in many ways not because it’s on innovation I say but because of its twisted analysis on the India’s yesterday year’s un-devisable monopoly innovation strategy, simply I mean the license raj or buffed quota raj.

• Israel is an incredibly innovative nation. It ranks the highest in the world in the per-capita number of patents filed. A partner at A&G Partners, which specialises in building bridges between Israel and Asia, says that even her hairdresser has a patent on an exact algorithm for deducing the right hair shade! A good 22% of the Nobel Prize winners are Jewish; among women who have been awarded the Nobel Prize, 38% are Jewish. These are amazing statistics, considering that the number of Jews on the planet peaked at 18 million before World War II, and today, number only about 12 million.

• Dr R A Mashelkar often says that India should be permanently angry. The country demonstrated during the Green Revolution the same davka and rosh gadol when the US suspended the PL 480 shipments.

• India has produced DCD icons, who practised being daringly-creative and disciplined: Vallabhai Patel and C Subramaniam in public life, Ratan Tata and E Sreedharan in industry and infrastructure, and Raghunath Mashelkar and M S Swaminathan in science and technology.

• Our academic curriculum in management and our national folklore in innovation should progressively shift the fulcrum of focus to this fourth C of channelisation: which involves learning how to create an Innovation Engine to plan and execute risky ideas, which may not get nurtured naturally in the Performance Engine.

• Coupled with the existing presence of the first three Cs of challenge-creativity-chaos , Indians can then aim to deliver and celebrate breakthrough innovations in the coming decades. The future for Indian innovation is bright.

Future is always ‘bright’ but the near future is ‘dismal’.