Strengthening ease of innovation is of paramount importance: Ramesh Abhishek, DPIIT

Commercialising India's highly useful yet lesser-known innovations and popularising globally-followed industry best practices to nurture innovations is going to be the major future focus area, Ramesh Abhishek, Secretary, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) said.

The government is going to implement a number of initiatives to help commercialise innovations by country's entrepreneurs and founders, including those from the startup fraternity, he said while speaking at the curtain raiser of the global launch of 'Global Innovation Index, 2019' in New Delhi.

"In the light of National Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) policy unveiled in 2016, we formed a taskforce to analyse sector-wide areas of improvements in country's innovation landscape. With inputs gained from various stakeholders, we have made significant progress. India's rank in the GII ranking has improved from 81st in 2015 to 57th in 2018, and the country has been ranked among the most innovative country in the Central and South Asia region every year since 2011. These numbers are a testimonial of country’s rapid strides on this front," Abhishek remarked.

The government is giving a big push to IPR education by including it in school curricula, and so far over 4 lakh students have been covered under this initiative, he said.

Co-published by World intellectual property organisation (WIPO), Cornell University and INSEAD, the global innovation index (GII) ranking is an annual ranking that quantifies the state of national innovation ecosystem across countries. The GII ranking for 2019 will be released on July 24.

Several initiatives to commercialise innovations, especially those by country’s public-funded universities, are in the offing, informed the DPIIT representative.

On the occasion, WIPO Director General Francis Gurry, while highlighting that India has consistently outperformed on innovation relative to its GDP per capita, said, “India has consistently been ranked among the top countries on innovation parameters such as information and Communication Technology (ICT) Services Exports, (number of) graduates in science and engineering, the quality of universities and scientific publications, economy-wide investments, and creative goods exports.”

In 2016, the DPIIT created a high-level task force on innovation to improve India's innovation system based on the GII metrics, and in 2017, the first consultative exercise was organised to address India specific data gaps in the GII to further improve its innovation performance.

“India also stands out in the GII ranking of the world's top science and technology clusters, with Bengaluru, Mumbai and New Delhi featuring among global top 200 clusters,” Gurry added.