I shall start off with some brief comments on Kerala Development and Innovation Strategy Council (K-DISC). It’s a rather new organisation initiated in the state in 2018. It is only one of its kind because, State Innovation Councils established at the instance Sam Pitroda in 2010 in all other states have been wound up throughout the country. The only state with the remnants of the State Innovation Council is Kerala where it has been remodeled. That is how K-DISC originated. Brief introduction about K-DISC activities has already been made by           Dr K. M Abraham, our founder Chairman. Hence, I will not attempt to make a comprehensive overview of K-DISC activities.

To give a taste of the activities leading to innovation promotion in government done by                 K-DISC, I will touch upon three projects; a project called the Blood Bag traceability, where we work with the General Hospital and the Parasalla Community Health Centre. They work in a hub and spoke mode to meet the needs of blood transfusion. In this project we have used a technology developed by Bagmo Private limited, a startup in maker village to reduce perishability of blood bags using IoT devices. The second one is a collision avoidance pilot with Intel for KSRTC wherein using telematics the possibilities of collision between vehicles is reduced. This is going to be implemented in new vehicles for KSRTC financed by KIIFB. Third one is a real time retinal image quality assessment and feedback system for government ophthalmological hospital Trivandrum. This is done with support of C-DAC. These projects undertaken by us belong to Industry 4.0 technology adaptation in government departments. 

My focus however is on the innovation ecosystem, which is primarily for democratizing the innovation system in the state. It’s a flagship program of K-DISC. The objective of this program is basically to nurture young talents interested in pursuing avant-garde research academics and business model building. We have promised a three-year hand holding for idea creation, prototyping, testing and launching. Prominence is also given to social innovation, along with business development. We partner with the Startup Mission. Capacity Building of mentees is around the Stanford University Methodology of design thinking which has now become the de-facto standard for real life problem solving. We have a program for mentoring of mentors specially developed for us by the IIM Calicut. This looks at a new product development framework integrated with a fuzzy front-end. Basically, we are trying to draw practices from the industry for product development, trying to weed out the fuzziness of the ideas and to put the process in the discipline of new product development.

We have a program in which any new innovation can be fostered with its focus on democratising innovation, it cannot be a blueprint program. It has been continuously evolving. Over the years, there has been an increase in the number of ideas that came up; 1391 ideas in the first year (2018) which increased to 2000 during the second year and almost doubled that in the third year. We have a very strong funneling approach of removing ideas which might not work and which are not worth pursuing.  Thus, we had to reduce the ideas in 2018 to 204 which increased to 371 in the second year and 800 in the third year. We have put in a mechanism of generating ideas from schools, colleges and universities. We have a network of 1143 institutions during 2018 we just now enhanced this to 2900. Around 400 of them in our network are professional colleges and university departments and the rest of them are schools, polytechnics and other institutions. From each of these institutions we have, two facilitators who are our ambassadors who have been trained in the industry 4.0 and the innovation methodology. We have tried working out a hub and spoke mechanism wherein eventually the hubs would emerge as Centers of Excellence. This would be linked to various partner institutions making the spoke mechanism. We have developed a very clear methodology not only for screening the ideas, but also for improving the group dynamics within the ideas through group techniques.

This is the architecture of the young innovation program which we have built up. We have a completely electronic platform for doing all our operations. We have a digital idea platform, which is connected to high schools’ polytechnics and higher education institutions and research centers. We have District Innovation Councils, which are going to come into action from this year onwards in the evaluation programs. We also have a mentor mentee platform, which is completely electronic. One of the very important things that we have found as a part of the first few years of the program is that very systematic mentoring is required, both from the industry experts as well as from the academia for translating ideas to clear targets. We have not been able to put that in place during the first year. But during the second year, we have been able to put in place an electronic platform for this. We hope that the quality of delivery would substantively relate to mentoring. The mentors have been trained and positioned.

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