Inclusive+innovation

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Module 5. Inclusive Innovation
The following is from the World Bank's S&T Action Plan. Download from []

Inclusive innovation programs are designed to help countries build the STI capacity they need to meet the daily needs of the four billion people with an income of less than two dollars a day who live at the so called “Bottom of the Pyramid” (BOP). Living in poverty, they lack access to such necessities as water and sanitation services, housing, quality education, basic health care, electricity, telephones, internet, roads, and modern financial services. Addressing the needs of the BOP is an essential component of inclusive globalization and, therefore, must be a priority objective of STI capacity building partnerships. The objective of inclusive innovation is not to produce low performance, “cheap” knock-off versions of rich country technologies so that they can be marketed to poor people. Rather, the objective is to harness sophisticated science and technology know-how to invent, design, produce, and distribute, primarily via private sector SMEs, high performance technologies at prices that can be afforded by the billions of people at the BOP. As Dr. R.A. Mashelkar declared during the December 2009 Global Forum : “The challenge [of inclusive innovation] is to deliver //high performance// products, processes and services at an ultra low price for resource poor people, from housing to transport and from medicines to computers. Such innovations should not just be //affordable// but //extremely affordable//. For achieving this, one cannot rely on just //incremental// innovation but //extreme// innovation or //disruptive// innovation. Then only can they be truly inclusive.” Inclusive innovation programs must also develop mechanisms that will encourage those at the BOP, who are typically excluded from the innovation process, to co-create and co-innovate inclusive solutions. To be inclusive, the BOP must be included in the innovation process. It is not sufficient for OECD institutions simply to parachute “inclusive” technologies into developing countries. Inclusive solutions will be much more sustainable in the long run if developing countries build the capacity to generate their own inclusive innovation solutions. Partnerships can play an important role in this capacity building process.
 * Inclusive Innovation Challenges **

Inclusive innovation programs must address two major challenges. The first is helping developing countries build indigenous research and engineering capacity so that they can handle these inclusive innovation tasks without relying entirely on outside assistance. Unfortunately, science and engineering institutions in many developing countries are currently not geared to producing inclusive innovations and addressing problems at the BOP – or at any other levels of the pyramid, either. Indeed, many of these institutions are trapped in a vicious circle, as depicted in Figure 3. Funding for science and technology is relatively low and generally not sufficient to support high quality, socially and economically relevant research. Yet requests by scientists for additional resources are often rejected on the grounds that they have not generated relevant research results with previous funding. As a result, the system remains stuck. High level political commitment will be required to establish new arrangements for STI – where more funding is provided for inclusive innovation capacity building programs to enhance the relevance and quality of the existing STI system. The second challenge relates to scaling up, marketing, and deploying new, promising inclusive innovations. These potentially valuable innovations tend to be isolated -- from each other, from potentially helpful technology commercialization and diffusion efforts, from local entrepreneurship development and support programs, and from public and private funding sources that could help take ideas from concept to prototype. For example, many inclusive innovations showcased at the World Bank’s Development Marketplace (DM), catalogued by India’s Honeybee Network, or developed by scientists and engineers working at the Global Research Alliance, CGIAR, MIT’s D-Lab, SMU, Purdue, or Arizona State University, among others remain stuck in the lab or at the prototype stage. They are not transferred to SMEs for production and distribution. Needless to say, this blunts their potential development impact. Similarly, a successful inclusive innovation that was developed for and marketed in a rural village in Africa, for example, may also be relevant for rural villages in South Asia or Central America. Unfortunately, regional cross pollination is a rare occurrence. <span style="display: block; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: justify;">A number of factors account for this isolation. For example, individual scientists, engineers, and inventors – irrespective of whether they are working in developing countries or at MIT’s D-Lab -- do not have the capacity to scale-up, market, and deploy their inventions and yet, at the same time, the institutions needed to handle these tasks do not exist in many developing countries. Similarly, the know-how needed to enable these institutions to operate efficiently needs to be transferred from developed to developing countries. And finally, many institutions such as MIT, Arizona State, etc. that are actively promoting inclusive innovation programs do not have the financial and technical capacity to address these institutional and training needs.

<span style="display: block; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: justify;">The World Bank does not have laboratories to generate inclusive innovations. But in collaboration with various partners and in a series of strategic interventions targeted at various critical links in the inclusive innovation chain – R&D, product design, financing, entrepreneurship support, marketing, and distribution -- it can help to overcome these obstacles.