India Inc:
Aditya Dev Sood is an expert on innovation, particularly its relationship with design, entrepreneurship and social change. Like a teenager coming of age, India has known for almost two decades that it is slowly, continuously changing. And with that change comes the need, every year or so, to mark progress and celebrate birth, or rebirth.
But this winter, something new is happening, something like a single sombre ceremony, being marked all over the country in different gatherings and festivals of ideas – entry into adulthood. And what primarily marks this adulthood is a need to understand the change that is still going on and to be responsible for creating a new path in the world, based on understanding, critical reflection and synthesis.
Mahajan K. Bhan, the government of India’s secretary for biotechnology, recently talked to me about the relationship between innovation and personal connectedness. “All ideas come from talking with other people,” he said. The more one talks to people from different perspectives, with unlike minds, the more interesting ones become ideas. And from those ideas and from that connectedness you can change your life, you can change the world.
India’s ongoing entry into the global system has meant a significant transformation in the reading habits of its key decision-makers and lead influencers.
Like the Financial Times, other major newspapers and news channels all now have Indian editions and India-specific coverage, content and cultural platforms, on their own or through Indian partners. The kind of online writings that Indians now have access to has become more polymorphous, easily encompassing Pakistani politics, gossip from London Galleries, and Brooklyn hipster lifestyles, not to mention financial and business news and opinion that increasingly cross-cuts all these life-universes from around the world.
The ideas conference, Names Not Numbers, which will open in Mumbai for the first time later this month, makes all those transformations real as an international event where some of these cross-continental conversations will be staged for the first time. Organised in collaboration with the Financial Times of London, the British Council and other partners, Names Not Numbers is a workout for the mind and spirit, bringing people from different walks of life together for common reflection on the topics of our times.
I got a sense of the milieu of the event in its New York avatar earlier this year, where I met writers, business people, men and women of conscience, experts in finance and policy, and otherwise smart and swish people one would like to know, talk to, and even emulate. I met up with Seth Godin, the out-sized writer on business and management, who gave me crucial advice for how my company, the Center for Knowledge Societies, could grow and thrive given India’s ongoing innovation turn.
I became friends with an Argentine Brit married to a Colombian who’s now advising me on my forthcoming book on innovation. And I met a fashion writer for the FT who happily showed me all around New York’s karaoke bars.
As India enters into its innovation age, the role of the ideas conference will get larger and larger.
Attending these events is going to become a necessary part of people’s adult lives, so they can access new knowledge and new paradigms, which they might use to advance their own areas of specialisation. The ongoing enhancement of one’s own wetware and re-synching it with other minds through such events will be a new normal and everyday part of India’s innovation future.
More info: www.namesnotnumbers.com/mumbai
