Innovation and India's Growth

Innovation and inclusive development are watchwords for both policymakers and empirical researchers in India today. While the former is considered the means to achieve accelerated and competitive economic growth, the latter is a sociopolitical necessity as well as a economic desire, arising out of the prolonged realisation that the benefits of economic growth did not percolate to the “bottom of the pyramid” (BoP)—either in the period of “economic planning” or in the period of “economic liberalisation” so far. It is in this context that the book under review assumes significance.

In Chapter 1, Shyama V Ramani, the editor of the volume, describes the context in which India’s National System of Innovation (NSI) was founded—the need for assessing India’s industrialisation as part of planned economic development. This chapter has a conceptual framework that synthesises the different chapters of the book. Ramani stresses on the need to look at the NSI approach to describe the process of catching-up by developing countries—particularly the emerging economies of today. NSI has emerged as a major conceptual framework in the past three decades to organise historical evidence on the accumulation of scientific and technical innovations, and industrial capabilities of latecomer countries attempting to catch up with the developed ones.