Science and Technology Secretary Ashutosh Sharma said frugal innovations are critical for finding grass root solutions to the economic and societal problems.
But frugal innovations had to maintain their functionality, quality and accessibility to promote sustainable development, he told a Global R&D Summit organized by FICCI.
Sharma said innovation should not be seen in isolation but as a chain of structures and events beginning from scouting of ideas, start-ups and supporting and scaling them up for public good in areas such as education and healthcare.
He said R&D infrastructure, education and a cultural ethos were the key long term enablers of a sustainable innovation ecosystem.
Making a distinction between science and innovation, Sharma said, while “science is global, innovation is local”. Through a new programme called ‘INSPIRE’, DST was proposing to reach out to five lakh school children all over the country to generate 15 lakh innovative ideas and eventually zeroing on 1000 such innovations that would then be converted into prototypes.
The Secretary said that the two most important attributes that give rise to innovation are the ability to take risks and be tolerant towards failure and the challenge today is to solve the problems related to healthcare, IT, smart cities, manufacturing, security and defence.
The road ahead, he added, was commercialization of innovation and the ‘mantra’ was the need to connect with the ministries and departments, academia and industry, businesses and R&D institutions and between the Centre and States.
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