By Kriteesh Patel:
This is Pragyan, the annual international techno-management fest of NIT Trichy. Pragyan is completely run by students and is the first student-run organisation in the world to get an ISO 20121:2012 Certification for Sustainable Event Management.
A plethora of events, workshops, outreach programs, exhibitions and guest lectures take place every year.
On January 28, at Chennai, we hosted the Pragyan Youth Summit, a platform to address ‘India’s Innovation Imperative’, by creating an opportunity to encourage and inform the youth on the importance of innovation and enkindle young minds to think and redefine conventions. Pragyan Youth Summit 2017 was an attempt to take stock of the radical change around us in terms of innovation and provide solutions to accelerate innovative Indian technologies into the global markets.
The day saw two keynote addresses. One from Padma Shri Dr. Anil Kumar Gupta, the founder of Honey Bee Network and the other by Dr. Aloknath De, the CTO of Samsung R&D India. Dr. Gupta emphasised on the need for innovation in our society through various real-time examples where he had witnessed the effect of innovation. Many times, due to necessity and challenges, a product of innovation is created at the bottom of the pyramid which is called grassroots innovation. This was explained by Dr. De, who presented his talk on the importance of lateral thinking in improving innovation and smart engineering.
Many times, due to necessity and challenges, a product of innovation is created at the bottom of the pyramid which is called grassroots innovation. This was explained by Dr. De, who presented his talk on the importance of lateral thinking in improving innovation and smart engineering.
‘Marching Towards The Innovation Economy’ was the topic of the first discussion, which was moderated by Dr. Prashant Salwan, a faculty at IIM Indore. The other panellists included Cmde. R B Verma, Dr. Manish Gupta, Former VP at Xerox Corp, Dr. Anil Wali, Director of FITT, Mr. Chandan Potukuchi of SAP and Dr. Sumanth C Raman. The discussion was intense with topics ranging from India’s capacity and potential to innovate to the reasons why India’s global ranking in innovation is sub-par.
The panellists also discussed the importance of innovation in healthcare and related areas, as well as how our government can help bring about better innovation. This was shortly followed by a Q&A session, with the audience raising their concerns on business models and their impact on the innovation of public services.
The second panel discussion was on ‘Inclusive Innovation’, which had Mr. Dhimant Parekh, founder of thebetterindia.com, as its moderator. Ms. Ajaita Shah, CEO of Frontier Markets, Mr. Kartik Desai, Principal of Asha Impact, Dr. Priyanka Sarkar, VP at ICFA and Dr. Arun Venkatesan, CTO at Villigro were the other panellists present. The discussion was on various fields that were in dire need of innovation and mainly revolved around education and agriculture. It was a very interactive session and the panellists showed great enthusiasm in answering the questions posed by the participants and also cited personal experiences to explain their view.
As the grand finale for the summit, we saw Mr. Zubin Sharma, the founder and CEO of Project Potential and Mr. Amol Arora, MD of SHEMFORD Futuristic Schools, deliberate under the banner of ‘Breaking Barriers’. An interactive session of two like-minded personalities from contrasting backgrounds, ‘Breaking Barriers’ covered the different aspects of innovative entrepreneurship and offered counsel to budding entrepreneurs on their ideas and business models.
We envisioned PYS with the main idea of bringing technology and innovation one step closer to the youth, and more importantly, to inspire the essence of leadership in the student community. Pragyan Youth Summit 2017 concluded with one major takeaway. Our nation knows what it takes to innovate – a continual commitment towards science and research and an economic climate that rewards innovation and entrepreneurship.
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