Innovation is always explored by academic scholars and organisations to identify its factors, features and often ends in producing unharmonious results. This article advocates research on innovation by systematically developing a structure of the innovation process. The conceptual progress, generation and implementation processes, experiences, and influences of innovation on organisations have been explained thoroughly in this article. Previous research work has been aligned with either one of the two components of the innovation process. However, this article deliberates each and every part of the innovation process to combine them in a single framework and discusses their contribution in generating diversified outputs. By developing an understanding of innovation as a process, this article aims to complement existing models of innovation to further extend and advance theory and research on the innovation process and outcome in organisations.

India’s contribution to the total global research and development expenditure is about 2.8 percent. In terms of its own GDP, in the past decade, India has nearly spent a consistent 0.6-0.7 percent on research and development. This is in stark comparison to the United State of America’s 2.8 percent and Korea’s 4.2 percent. India has focused on the latter end of the TRL (Technology Readiness Level) scale. This is evident from a blooming startup ecosystem. It has still not been able to galvanise its S&T ecosystem to produce game-changing deep-tech technologies like the ARPANET or to take a more recent example, the language translation AI systems of the Chinese Baidu. One sector where India has done well is biotechnology. An indirect indicator of this is the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, the Serum Institute of India, which is based in Pune.

A key component for any nation’s science and technology strategy is how it promotes technology transfer like it is done in other developed countries. So, to promote technology transfer, India can adopt numerous strategies that are used by these developed countries. In fact, India is already applying a few to varying degrees of success. The accelerating spread at which new technologies are coming up in a competitive environment worldwide, it makes it imperative that new ideas and technologies are identified at their source in the scientific world, carried forward by technological innovation and piloted into commercial production.

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The authors are Naman Agrawal, Senior Associate and Dr. Ashok Sonkusare, Deputy Advisor at NITI Aayog.

Views expressed are personal.