Following are some of the notes, thoughts captured during the session. The videos for the session are available at this link.

Sessions:
The Indian Innovation Environment and the road ahead : Sam Pitroda

• Indian government needs to focus on the problems of poor. The rich have access to resources also there are far too many people working in the world to solve their (so called firstworldproblems) issues.
• To solve the problems for the people at bottom of the pyramid, scalability and affordability are very important. Technology for example, ensures scalability and affordability, thus in India we have such high adoption of cell phones.
• American model based highly on consumption is not sustainable, but sadly people across the world are just copying it. India has to find a new way in the areas of Health, Education, Agriculture etc.
• Create innovation councils in many industry domains, for e.g. bamboo, leather, milk etc. With a focus on modernizing the tools, access to scientific knowledge so that they can compete in the world economy.
• Information management, in the area of GIS, RTI and access to govt data, preserving old know how is critical for India moving forward.

Industry Panel: New Frontiers in Innovation
Moderator: Vinita Gupta, Chairman, Quick Eagle
Cloud Computing – Pradeep Sidhu, Founder Juniper Networks
BioTech – Ajit Gill, CEO Nektar Therapeutics
Social Media – DJ Patil, former Chief Scientist at LinkedIn

Most interesting talk from this panel was by Ajit Gill, he essentially put forward a rebuttal to Sam Pitroda’s earlier keynote. It would have been great to have debate between them, but Sam Pitroda had already left right after his talk.

• According to Ajit, govt is the creator of the problem and it should just get out of the way of people.
• Observation about Indian professional in pharma industry (from an american researchers perspective), they were good at doing what they were told. But couldn’t navigate through ambiguous problems. I think this is the problem with the Indian education system, where there isn’t much emphasis on building things individually or in a team.
• DJ Patils talk, on importance of data science and how it gives insight into todays problems. Related to this, nice article on Businessweek few months back, “This tech bubble is different”.

University – Industry Innovation Collaboration
Moderator – Desh Deshpande
Curtis Carlson – President and CEO, Stanford Research Institute
Mani Chandy – Dy. Chair, Caltech
Pradeep Khosla, Dean CIT, CMU

Very interesting panel, highly distinguished speakers (they are university professors after all!). Mostly the panel focussed around how universities help with innovation, creating jobs for the future, academic research in India, ideas of reverse innovation.

Cross Border Innovation Essentials
Moderator – Raj Mashruwala, Investor
IP – Aloke Agarwal, CEO Evalueserve
Funding – Ashish Gupta, Senior MD, Helion Venture Partners

This talk was mainly about doing business in India, some ground realities (things which work and which didn’t work), what important skills required  as an entrepreneur etc. Some takeaways,

• Aloke spoke about interesting difference between India and China. For him, India is like a Chaos which creates new mutations and new species are created due to it. Where as China is at the other polar opposite to India in many sense and we shouldn’t compare India against it.
• Ashish spoke animately about his experience as a VC in India. As per his experience the important expertise they look for a person in India is the one to manage a team or project, being able to consistently deliver on schedule.