On Innovation, Or The Lack Thereof

Inspite of having the IITs and holding some of the toughest college entrance exams in the world, we in India lag far behind the West when it comes to innovation and invention in the fields of mechanical, civil and electrical engineering. However, we are as good as any other nation, if not better, in innovation in the field of software development. It is worth thinking about what could be the reason why the West is so advanced in these fields whereas we lag behind. Even the R&D departments in our country do little other than validate field results and homologate western technology to suit Indian needs.

I was once listening to Steve Via’s for the love of god when it occurred to me what a wonderful piece of engineering laid in the small earphones in my ears. But long before this speaker saw the mechanized mass production in factories, and long before it came to be invented in a laboratory, there must have been someone who must have put a piece of paper or a leaf from a tree between his lips and blown on it, and figured out that the vibration on the piece of paper could produce a sound.

Since the paper or the leaf vibrates at high frequencies, the resulting sound is shrill and squeaky. After this fact came to be known, some quirky fellow somewhere must have wondered if he could force the paper to vibrate at a desired frequency by some means. By attaching a coil to the paper, and by making it go back and forth with the use of an electromagnet, one could control the frequency of vibration by modulating the current being fed to the electromagnet. And then it would have taken maybe someone else who worked for years to find the right type of paper, the right type of magnet and the right type of recorder for the frequency to be fed to the current modulator to finally come with something that could be called a speaker. And what a pity it is that he never got to hear the complex sound systems that we have today…

Blowing against a piece of paper to make it squeal is a frivolous act suitable to idlers and children. Inventing the speakers building upon that idea is awesomeness.

Now if we look at it, the first act, of blowing against a leaf, would have been done by innumerous people in their childhood. But how many of them would have dedicated their entire lives in order to produce a way to make the leaf or the paper play the desired sound? So what could it have been that prompted some people somewhere to delve into the subject to such depths? And if we can figure out the factors that lead to it, can we develop an environment in which we can foster innovation and inventions?

Our lives are focused broadly along two tasks. One, the need to earn our livelihood and ensure our own well being and the well being of others dependent on us. Second, to find a means to attaining the first end in the most enjoyable way possible. And I think most of us would agree to forego on a little bit in the livelihood they earn if the work that they earn it with is enjoyable and agreeable to them.

There would have been people all over the world who had the inclination to delve into the depths of things and to create new things. But a person who had to earn his livelihood could only pursue such an endeavor part time, as a hobby, as long as his livelihood is not taken care of. Or he would have to have a maddening sense of devotion to that subject, often earning him the reputation of a heretic or a lunatic, thereby preventing the people to look into and understand his work.

And this is where I feel the West overtook us when it came to innovation. Long before the speaker as such was conceptualized as a marketable commodity that could bring returns if its research was sponsored, long before people could have known how radically it would influence our society, someone somewhere must have either had enough family riches to forget about his livelihood and spend all his time on studying vibrations, or there must have been someone who was willing to provide a livelihood to a person who wanted to research anything that came to his fancy. For it is only when one’s livelihood is taken care of that someone may spend years of his life building an aero-plane, or trying to figure out how to record and transmit voices or even think of something as irrelevant to mankind’s existence as a gel based ink pen!

And if there was someone who was willing to sponsor the works of neurotics and fun lovers, how could he ensure that the person that was given the money grant was genuine or fake? Or whether it would result in something useful or not? Simply put, he couldn’t. But if the amount paid to the person as a salary, apart from the money he would need to facilitate his research, would be less than what he could earn if he worked outside, even then you could half ensure that only genuine people would opt to take your money; for the other half would be the bunch of lazies willing to forego better earning opportunities for easy money. You could also test for aptitude, or if someone had done something earlier and wanted to further his work, you could select him to get the grant. You could also have yearly reviews or publications that periodically published the works of people to ensure that the research and the results found out were made public, hence also eliminating duplicity and taking innovation to ever increasing levels by furthering other people’s work.

The crux of the matter is that for innovation to increase, someone in the society who did not want to go into business or service of some sort because he had an intrinsic inclination towards something which was not beneficial directly to anyone at that point of time, but which could develop into something that, again, could be of use to mankind, should have avenues to do that and still ensure that his livelihood was taken care of. And in this society, innovation would excel.

We in India look upon education as a means to get an employment. And because the type of education you get determines the kind of remuneration you could earn, we find that there are hoards of students rushing to get admission to some particular courses (namely engineering and management), while there is a huge majority of other courses which hardly attract any takers.

In my opinion, most jobs require only a level of understanding that is equivalent to higher secondary. To work as say a clerk or a receptionist or a tele-caller or a salesman or a service engineer, class 12 education would be more than enough. And BPO employers recognized this when they suddenly needed hoards of tele-callers in the early 2000s. Having bachelors in history or economics or even engineering hardly benefits someone who has to supervise the sales in a store, or oversee the collection of debt from credit card holders or the majority of jobs that our graduates do these days. Higher education should only be taken by those who want to learn something about a particular field because they intend to use it in their work.

But we find that the majority of mechanical engineers end up working with software firms like TCS or Infosys or HCL, or an automobile engineer who had been taught machine design ends up just selling the product in the market, an act which he has not been trained in and which does not use anything that he learnt in his engineering. Class 12 physics is enough to understand how stuff works. You don’t ned to study design for that.

And the reason why this happens is because students and their parents nowadays seek differentiation. In my dad’s time, an ITI or diploma holder could get a good job, but those with a B.Tech would earn better because they would have a job that would be more technical, requiring the extra experise. Looking at the better earning potential of the B.Tech holders, people then started pursuing higher education so that they could differentiate themselves from the crowd and get into the better earner bracket. And now we have reached a situation when everyone around has at least a bachelor’s degree and is still jobless or working in a field totally unrelated to his learning, and slowly post-graduates (esp the MBA kind) also are finding it difficult to get good jobs because they are no longer differentiated from the crowd.

IITs are the toughest institutes in the world to get into and offer the best technological education in India, but the graduates who come out hardly help to improve our technology. And the post-graduates from IITs are mostly graduates from lesser known colleges who aim for the IIT tag because they could not make it to that level after their 12^th. And people yawn that IITians go abroad and do not contribute to the nation, and Narayanan Murthy says that the quality of students passing out of the acclaimed institute has gone down and other say that very little innovation comes out from these colleges, and blah blah, but they’re missing the point. The point of going to an IIT or an engineering college is not, for most people, about getting the best technical education or furthering the development of the nation. The point of getting into an IIT, whether at graduate or post-graduate level, is to differentiate oneself from the crowd! To get the best employment that our nation or the US has to offer!

Graduates and post-graduates migrate to the US for research, because there they get well paid (living taken care of) and get good facilities for research. Or they opt to go out into the job market in India by leveraging the IIT degrees and get into managerial positions. Same is true for all other engineering colleges as well, including my own.

We in India are still in the era where people are striving hard to improve their living standards. Research, innovation and drilling down into the depths of things till you come up with a discovery is last on the minds of people who are finding it hard to find their preferred mode of earning their livelihood.

Historically, in a country torn apart by politics, western exploitation and over-population, no one in the society could afford to look at someone who does not directly and in defining terms contribute to the society with respect. Hence a person working away on something that, unknown then, would years later turn out to be the first camera or working at lengths to improve the comfort that a sofa can provide would be looked down upon, and would hardly find any takers who would sponsor his dream. The West encouraged this, and saw innovation in all spheres, whereas we could not.

Poetry was a subject patronized by the Mughals, as was architecture. Hence they gave to the world some of the best poets and architects. Patronizing means simply to allow oneself a livelihood and a place in society even though you are, in the eyes of many others, doing nothing that can have guaranteed results.

Anyways, once we started to catch up with the West and built institutes of learning, sadly for us, economics took over. And the meaning of research and innovation and of building laboratories lost its intrinsic meaning because it became a means for many to earn a livelihood that they could not earn elsewhere, and hence the selection into these institutes no longer mattered upon interest and inclination, but for an opportunity to earn and differentiate.

Of all the labs that were in my college, there was none that could be called a lab. They were all, rather, museums for archaic technology. And no one objected to that, because we are good at doing things without understanding the importance of why we are doing them…or rather, because we understand them to be a part of the curriculum required to clear the credits, and nothing more.

And as for all the research that goes on in companies, it is always easier and less costly to buy a technology from abroad and have engineers homologate it, than to pay them to build their own machines with little chance of a timely development of a marketable product.

So to summarize, the reason why we lag behind in innovation is because it is not by inclination and ideas that one gets admissions into colleges or scholarships for research, but by entrance exams that many slave months preparing for just so they could earn a living better than they would get otherwise. And the reason why education levels are so high whereas the standard of education is so low is because education is taken as a differentiator, not an enabler towards an end. Hence expectations are more towards the degree itself than the quality of education that is imbibed. And economics and employment opportunities ensure that this would continue to be the trend for years to come.

The reason why we lack in core engineering and technology fields, namely mechanical, electrical and civil, but however manage to do well in field like software, is because the research and innovation in software does not require intensive monetary support when it comes to coding. However, in fields like video game development and graphics, which in fact do require sophisticated equipment and paraphernalia, we are still much behind.

What can be done about this? I will discuss this in the next post. You may also contribute by writing in the comments below.

A relative of mine recently expatriated from the US and was surprised to find that her cousin’s daughter, though the same age as her own, had the multiplication tables of 2 and 3 by heart and knew 4 letter words, even though she was just in preparatory school. The little girl knew multiplication tables by heart, even though she did not know how to add or multiply! Without knowing what she was doing and why, she was being forced to learn the tables by her mom because she was being prepared to get into one of the best schools in the town, the admission to which is by a written entrance. The other girl, who had been taught in the US, on the other hand, knew craft and 3 letter words and could count a little, and though this horrified her mom as she worried about her daughter passing the examination, I smiled as I said, welcome back to India…