Dr. R A Mashelkar, National Research Professor and Former Director General, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) visited CSIR-National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (CSIR-NEERI), Nagpur on January 27.
During his visit, Dr Mashelkar delivered a lecture on ‘From Leap Frogging to Pole-vaulting: Creating the Magic of Radical Yet Sustainable Transformation’ in the CSIR-NEERI Auditorium.
While delivering the lecture, Dr. Mashelkar said that India needs to come up with a new assured innovation framework, which is affordable, scalable, sustainable, universal, rapid, excellent and distinctive. India should use a suitably `quantified’ framework for assessing, funding and monitoring everything from start-ups to government funded projects, and even in-house institutional or industry projects. He showed as to how the assured framework can be used for a judicious evaluation of successful as also unsuccessful innovations.
He described about his book – ‘From Leap Frogging to Pole-vaulting: Creating the Magic of Radical Yet Sustainable Transformation’, in which he laid out the contours of an integrated strategy with assured success. He also spoke about why start-ups should pole-vault and not leapfrog based on the assured framework. The assured framework looks at scalability and sustainability in the economic, environmental and societal context and delves on why start-ups should be distinctive.
Dr. Mashelkar illustrated some recent game changing assured innovations which had high impact. He mentioned that telephone could reach to 50 million users in 50 years, but Jio took only 83 days, this is pole-vaulting. He emphasised on the need to create pole-vaulting innovation leaders to generate exponential value through innovation and leadership. ‘Assured’ can be a ‘one word policy statement’ to achieve accelerated inclusive growth, but remains incomplete without technology innovation, business model innovation, system delivery innovation, process innovation, policy innovation, etc.
Earlier, Dr. R A Mashelkar had a meeting with Dr. Rakesh Kumar, Director, CSIR-NEERI and the CSIR-NEERI scientists. During the meeting, Dr. Pawan Kumar Labhasetwar, Sr. Principal Scientist & Head, Water Technology and Management Division, CSIR-NEERI briefed about the involvement of CSIR-NEERI in field performance evaluation of 12 water treatment technologies for Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, including Hydro-dis water treatment system. He also explained various assured matrices used by CSIR-NEERI for technology evaluation.
Dr. R A Mashelkar also interacted with Sunil Mansinghka, Coordinator, Govigyan Anusandhan Kendra. Dr. J S Pandey, Chief Scientist & Head, Climate Change and Skilling Division (CCSD) introduced Dr. R A Mashelkar to the audience. Dr. Sadhana Rayalu, Chief Scientist & Head, Environmental Material Division (EMD) proposed the vote of thanks. Dr. Shalini Dhyani conducted the proceedings. Dr. Ankit Gupta, Scientist, CSIR-NEERI and Dr. Hemant Bherwani, Scientist, CSIR-NEERI coordinated the event.