Bhairavi Jani, India at 75, led this thematic breakout session along with Sneha Raman from CKS, with Chakshu Roy, PRS. It focused on specific steps that governments, corporations, social agencies, academics and individual citizens can take to better articulate and then build an Innovation Society. The session involved a role-playing game which divided all the participants into different sectors of society, as it were.
In order to achieve the final goal of building an innovation society, the players had to overcome a series of challenges and decide how best to build trust and participation in order to overcome these hurdles effectively. Each group was given opportunities, roles and certain regulations. They were also all asked to list their expectations of the other groups.
Participants talked a lot about how the different groups or sectors of society would need to develop new ways to collaborate and coordinate their efforts better. There also needs to be more of a move towards merging and aligning the interests and goals of these different segments of society. There was a lot of talk about young entrepreneurs and emerging startups and that there needs to be greater attention from the media, government and corporates to create an innovation hubs that will incubate and enable an innovation culture in India.
