Many persons have won honours on Republic Day for distinguished achievement in various fields of endeavour, but the spotlight also falls on a small group of ten individuals who got prizes for useful inventions. They have been chosen by the Inventions Promotion Board for developing ideas that are likely to benefit the economy. In a country as conservative as ours, new inventions are not always welcomed and exploited and, even in the mechanical field, the older models are praised to the detriment of the latest design. Yet there is also the attraction of novelty and a new type of wristwatch or radio has its customers. The Government is now ready to acknowledge that innovation is important if this country is ever to stand on its own technological feet. Industrialists are being urged not to import foreign technology if the required machines can be obtained from local sources. Considerable progress in local manufacture has, in fact, been made but the copying of foreign designs is more common than local invention. It should, however, be pointed out that many of the policies followed are not favourable to a climate of innovation. In an article published in The Hindu Weekly Magazine last Sunday, Mr. Jack Goldman of the Xerox Corporation of America described the factors which favoured the development of the “second industrial revolution” in the U.S. rather than in Europe. The Europeans no doubt had outstanding scientists and inventors, but the ideas developed by them did not reach the market as quickly as in America. The factors named by Mr. Goldman included a ready supply of capital, a mobile and skilful labour force and a market for new inventions. The latter were developed most rapidly in private industrial laboratories, where barriers between different scientific disciplines and the world of business had been knocked down. For example, while the original idea of the transistor came from research done in Purdue University, its actual development was undertaken in the Bell Laboratories and its exploitation as a commercial product was most rapid in Japan. This sort of easy transfer of ideas from laboratories and universities to the industrial sphere scarcely exists in India nor are people so willing to risk large amounts of capital on the exploitation of new inventions.
