Of Innovation and our education system

Yesterday there was a Pan IIM conference in Delhi and I, being an entrepreneur looking for investment, happened to be there. A well organized gathering it was too. Kiran Karnik the NASSCOM chairman was there as the keynote speaker. His speach was very insightful in some aspects.

He spoke at length on India's edge over other countries, what it is now and what it can/should be in the times to come. He said that India currently has its huge literate population as its major edge over other countries. The major revenue earners for India in international trade right now are outsourcing services, which rely on mainly efficiency. Here India has been able to attract business to its shores mainly because of a supply demand situation, where the work can be done in India at a fraction of the cost needed abroad.

Kiran mentioned that efficiency is not a great strength of ours as a culture. There is disproportionate importance given to ideas in our culture as opposed to doing something perfectly. Secondly, a huge strength of our culture is the amount of openness towards different perspectives and the ability to consider them simultaneously. This point is also captured in the book Argumentative Indian by Sen. His point then was that these cultural traits are very conducive to developing innovation as an edge and drive growth in the future. Equally, these traits made it an uphill battle to win in an efficiency game, as we have neighbours (China) who's culture is more adept for the efficiency game.

He therefore stressed that the Indian education system should be geared towards bringing out the ability to innovate.

His observations on the education system were three fold. One, our education system drives individual behaviour as opposed to team behavious which is most important in business success. This is brought by the lack of team evaluation. All scores are individual scores, save a few institutes like the IIMs which have group work projects. Two, our education system does not invite perspectives. If what you write matches the text you get 10, else a big fat 0! This is not conducive for an innovative mindset. Three, our method of teaching does not have any scope for experimentation. A school is either an ICSE, an SSC or a CBSE school, each with a rigidly defined curriculum and no leeway for experimentation in either teaching material or teaching methodology.

Of course added to this were the two oft discussed issues of primary education not being available to millions of Indians and the pay scale for teachers being so low that quality in education was an excercise in futility without raising the salary bar first.

All of thats fine I guess; the comments on innovation being a cultural strength for Indians and efficiency being a cultural weakness; that was the high point of the talk to me. An interesting insight.