Economically disadvantaged people can trigger frugal, creative and re-combinable innovations that can stimulate the creation of new pedagogies, products and processes. The model I talk about is 'sink' to 'source'. Such people are not 'sink' - passive recipients of our advice, or clients of corporate social responsibility. Given a chance they can be providers of solutions that may need further value-added in some cases. Why is it that the designers of pedagogies and curricula the world over neglect the need for learning from knowledge-rich, economically poor people? Why are there so few papers on innovations by workers in the organised and unorganised sectors compared to managerial innovations?

Presented at the Innovation for Development symposium, Wits University

Even countries that have suffered at the hands of colonial rulers show disdain towards knowledge from below. I feel sad and a bit alarmed at the purpose of this persistent neglect. Is it that if we acknowledge the potential of such common people to solve local problems through their own genius, our policies and programmes will have to be redesigned in a fundamentally different manner?

In India the government will not be able to continue with its massive rural employment programme by neglecting mental work, stressing only menial work. In Africa too, such neglect is rampant. Are not we the intellectuals and teachers mainly responsible for such biases in developmental thinking? After all we create the legitimacy for such thinking.

Innovation for development

Inclusive development

If we use the transaction costs framework, we can recognise at least two kinds of costs, ex-ante and ex-post. Ex-ante transaction costs include the cost of searching for information, finding suppliers, and negotiating and drawing up contracts. Ex-post transaction costs include monitoring and enforcement - in other words, compliance with the contract - side payments, costs of conflict resolution and if it does not work out, the cost of redrawing the contract.

In the context of an inclusive innovation model, we have to find ways in which both these costs can be reduced so that barriers to entry and exit go down and innovation partnerships can emerge between formal and informal sectors.

In the absence of local language databases, the search cost of affordable solutions goes up for small farmers and pastoralists. If there is no database of engineering projects done by students, then small-scale entrepreneurs cannot find the potential applications they could use. Without distributed knowledge management platforms like Techpedia.in, originality cannot be promoted, collaboration cannot be forged.

That is why the Honey Bee database emerged 20 years ago. It has helped the National Innovation Foundation pool 140,000 ideas, innovations and traditional knowledge examples from 545 districts in India in the last decade, beginning with 10,000 such ideas.

The President of India honours outstanding innovators every two years. President Pratibha Patil has invited the HBN Group to have an exhibition of grassroots innovations at the President's Place next month - the first ever such invitation to creative common people by any head of state.

The Honey Bee Network provides not only a justification but also an operational framework for partnerships among students, creative farmers and formal and informal sectors to emerge.

Conditions for inclusion

Inclusive or harmonious development is recognised as one of the most important goals of socio-economic development in most developing countries and in particular India, China, Brazil and South Africa.

Inclusion can take place by treating economically poor and disadvantaged people as (a) consumers of public policy of assistance and aid for basic needs, or (b) consumers of products at low cost made by large corporations or state or other enterprises.

Inclusion can also take place by building people's capacity to produce what they already know and do; or by enabling them to convert their innovations and outstanding traditional knowledge either as such or by blending or bundling them with the knowledge of others, into products marketed by them or other enterprises.

Inclusion can also be helped through linkages with modern research and development institutions, to receive technologies or products developed by institutions or to add value to people's knowledge, innovation or practices so they can develop value added products for eventual diffusion through commercial or non-commercial channels.

The Honey Bee Network has mobilised thousands of grassroots green innovations and traditional knowledge examples from all over India and different parts of the world.

Some of them provide useful heuristics for innovations in totally unrelated sectors. Let me illustrate:

Yusuf developed a groundnut digger in Rajasthan. The machine works on the principle of lifting the pods mixed with the soil, stirring a sieve or a wire mesh and collecting the pods and leaving the soil on the ground. Another entrepreneur from down south read about it and thought of a creative application; to use the groundnut digger for sea beach cleaning.

The problems were similar but a creative leap of imagination took place when a potential user transformed the context of the solution from one sector to another. The further the domain of application from the domain of origin, the higher the value one can get from an innovation.

Conclusion

The time has come to go beyond the boundaries of conventional organisations, disciplines, sectors and pedagogies. We have to look for platforms that enable creative but economically disadvantaged people to learn from their sustainable solutions. The 'sink' has to become the 'source' and the poor have to become providers.

* Anil K Gupta is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, executive vice-chair of the National Innovation Foundation, and coordinator of SRISTI: www.sristi.org/anilgi

* "Poor as Providers of Green Innovative Solutions: New pedagogies, processes and purposes" was presented last week at the international conference "Innovation for Development: Frontiers of research, practice and policy" held at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It is reproduced with permission.

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