PROMOTING INNOVATIONS AMONG YOUTH

Innovation in conjunction with scientific and technological progress and sustainable development are the hallmarks of any dynamic and vibrant society. Any society that fails to innovate and keep pace with fast-changing times and trends eventually stagnates and gets engulfed with a whole lot of insurmountable problems ultimately leading to the failure and collapse of its socio-economic, political and governance structures. Therefore, promoting innovations through proper planning and implementation particularly among youth must be the focus of attention of every nation serious at making persistent progress and keeping pace with the fast-changing world. Some of the measures that could be helpful in promoting innovations among youth are as under:

1.     Fostering a culture and harnessing a favourable ecosystem for innovation

For promoting and ensuring innovations we need to first create a viable culture and strong ecosystem for the same by making innovation a core value of our educational system. Various stakeholders of our higher education need to embrace this fact that trying anything new is no more a taboo or an act in futility. Innovation is an essential component and feature of progress and sustainable development. Therefore, we need to encourage our students and teachers to be industrious, productive, resourceful and open, share new ideas freely, explore novel initiatives without any fear of ridicule or retribution. We need to give our students and teachers enough time, space and freedom to innovate. We need to be open and approachable to new ideas, and set aside spaces for our students to create and share ideas. We can also support innovation by setting up regular meetings to share ideas, installing suggestion boxes at prominent places, creating a suggestion area on the staff intranet besides allocating dedicated times or rooms for the same. All sorts of red-tapeism needs to be abolished for promoting innovations. Procedural delays need to be done away with and flexibility needs to be inculcated in all matters making it hassle-free and easy for the innovators. 

2.     Investing liberally in innovation 

Though innovation itself is a big investment in the future of our youth, we need to invest liberally towards creating, fostering, implementing, sustaining and regularizing innovations among our young generation of students. However substantial financial investment on part of the government and educational institutions may be required for creating necessary infrastructure, engaging human resource, making logistic arrangements, training innovators, incubating innovative ideas, facilitating optimal product development, wide publicity and appropriate marketing of innovative products generated by the innovators. We also need to adequately allocate resources for innovation including sufficient time, suitable resource materials, sufficient information and communication channels, abundant employee support and effective leadership. Our teachers need to spare enough time for their students to break from routine roles of classroom teaching and inspire creative and innovative thoughts. This could be a monthly or weekly retreat in some inspiring lush-green ambience away from the classrooms. 

3.     Creating pathways for innovation 

Highlighting and portraying stories of successful youth entrepreneurs who have already received support from the government and established themselves in the field can serve as mentors and motivate others to pursue innovation and entrepreneurship. Our educational institutions need to have a well-designed programme in place in which new entrepreneurs are connected with more seasoned and experienced entrepreneurs to guide and support them along their journey. Need of the hour is to highlight power of youth entrepreneurship as a value creator and make it a reality by organizing social innovation workshops and offering mentorship facilities besides incubation and seed funding schemes to equip our youth with the skills, competencies and resources that they need to identify problems in their own communities and design solutions for them. Innovation incubation and entrepreneurship development should be made an essential feature of each and every higher educational institution that will nurture, foster and promote innovations from the stage of ideation through prototyping, research and development to proof of concept, upscaling and their wide scale adoption. NEP-2020 envisages that HEIs will focus on research and innovation by setting up start-up incubation centres, technology development centres, centres in frontier areas of research, greater industry-academic linkages and interdisciplinary research including humanities and social sciences research. 

4.     Engaging and encouraging trained manpower for innovation 

For promoting innovation in our educational institutions, we may need to hire people with different perspectives who have themselves been productive innovators and creative thinkers, who understand our vision and mission for innovation, align with our goals and institutional framework but have different perspectives and outlooks, come from diverse backgrounds, have passion and different abilities and are fully capable and competent to offer leadership and train our staff and students for innovation. Such personnel can serve as beacon lights in leading our youth on the path of innovation. Their responsibility will be to create a workforce with a different set of ideas or approaches towards problem-solving that in turn will effectively generate an innovative culture and approach. This may include screening out and shortlisting students with innovative ideas, constructive mindsets, creativity and analytical thinking abilities for further grooming for innovation and incubation of ideas. 

5.     Implement ideas quickly, avoid delays and incentivize talent 

Innovative ideas need to be implemented promptly without any administrative delays. All good ideas and suggestions for innovation need to be put into effect as quickly as possible. When students feel that they are influencing the direction of the innovation, they will be motivated to continue to share their ideas, work relentlessly towards the ultimate success of the idea and encourage the productivity of other students too. Successful innovators need to be encouraged through appropriate incentives and reward schemes. We can offer these rewards to individuals, teams or the entire workforce. This will encourage others to get involved and put their efforts more vigorously in innovation. We need to appreciate sincere efforts even if they do not translate into innovative products. Competitions, prizes and rewards are some of the most powerful tools to spark entrepreneurship and crowdsource innovation as they can mobilise clustered groups of students to focus on specific problems and therefore provide an effective means to begin building an entrepreneurship pipeline. 

6.     Adopt collaborative and multidisciplinary approaches 

We need to create an atmosphere that encourages students and staff of different departments and schools to work together in a collaborative manner and openly discuss ways to improve innovation. A multi-disciplinary approach needs to be adopted for creating best innovations. Our institutions may assign roles and responsibilities that foster new perspectives from different stakeholders and this can be made better through a series of process improvement brainstorming sessions among experts from different departments and schools. It is advisable to provide a dedicated area that will promote employee interaction and this could ideally be an open space where they can sit and chat in a soothing and relaxing environment. Unhindered and informal discussions often lead to improved employee relationship and trust, which encourages teamwork and often leads to innovation. 

7.     Institute feedback mechanism and quick response systems 

We need to institute a proper feedback mechanism in order to ensure that there is a process in place that everyone understands for assessing and evaluating each new idea. Students and teachers will be encouraged to suggest or recommend novel and innovative ideas only if they are confident that their ideas will be appropriately considered even if not implementable. Otherwise, if they feel they will be ignored, rebuked or ridiculed for their innovative ideas, they will avoid revealing the same to others. We need to acknowledge each and every suggestion in a timely manner and give genuine feedback on each idea. 

8.     Make innovation context-specific, locally and socially relevant and impact-centred 

All activities centred around promotion of innovation and entrepreneurship must be grounded in local contexts and must aim at addressing the problems encountered by the society. Innovation and incubation policy must be framed in the context of priorities, outlooks and insights of the youth since millennial generations have a greater awareness of planetary issues and a strong desire to make positive changes in the world. Community centres need to be established within universities where members of the civil society can approach with their problems for exploring solutions through innovations. 

9.           Involving young entrepreneurs and innovators in decision making process 

In order to make the policies and initiatives on innovation successful, we need to engage the end-recipient in the decision-making process in view of the fact that young people have an insatiable appetite for engagement, and not engaging them can have negative impact on the success of such programmes. In order to know how to promote the interests of youth in the right way, we need to create a network of young people driving dialogue, action and change. 

10.        Providing entrepreneurship training to youth 

In order to demolish the dogmas which argue that majority of the enterprises fail, robust training needs to be provided to the youth to reduce such risk. There is no denying the fact that entrepreneurship itself is a distinct skillset which is increasingly demanded by corporate and private recruiters and therefore providing specific training in entrepreneurship proves to be fruitful in addressing this need. Hence, policies meant to encourage youth entrepreneurship must enable young people to learn the skills necessary to pursue this path successfully. We need to train, guide, motivate and encourage youth to apply under various schemes launched by the Govt. of India for promotion of start-ups and innovation like Start-up India, Stand-up India, Make in India, Atal Innovation Mission, STEP platform, Biotech Push through BIRAC, NewGen IEDC, Atal Tinkering Labs and PRISM (Promoting Innovations in Individuals, Start-ups and MSMEs) scheme.