Ahmedabad-based Honey Bee Network (HBN), which started the concept of Shodh Yatra for grassroot innovations, proposes to consolidate the lessons of almost 25 years of research on innovations, through an international conference.

 

The International Conference on Creativity and Innovation at Grassroots will be held during December 3-5, 2012 at Tianjin University of Finance and Economics (TUFE), China. The second part of the conference will be held during December 7-8, 2012 at IIM, Ahmedabad, India.

 

According to Anil Gupta, HBN founder, "We also wish to learn from other explorers who have done empirical work or are concerned about the issues raised here and wish to influence policy in various countries at different levels."

 

This is the second international conference on the subject and will follow up the recommendations of the first conference held at IIMA in collaboration with HBN\\\\\\\'s sister concern SRISTI in January 1997. The impact of the first conference was witnessed in the form of founding GIAN in 1997 and later the National Innovation Foundation in 2000.

 

The Chinese section will focus on lessons from an Indo-Chinese comparative study of innovations and aim at pooling of knowledge for creating global public goods. The role of local authorities, farmers\\\\\\\' associations, youth organisations, inventors associations, formal research and development institutions in augmenting technological and institutional innovations will be studied. The Indian section of the conference will take stock of policy, institutional, and community based processes which have helped or can help in creating an inclusive innovation system. The conference will also focus on how intellectual property rights policies be tweaked to develop new granular models of incentivising innovative individuals and communities and how multi-media and multi-language technologies can be used to democratise the access to sustainable technologies globally.

 

China Innovation Network, which was set up in collaboration with SRISTI, has already shared 2000 innovations with HBN. SRISTI has also set up a twin centre for grassroots innovation in collaboration with Tianjin University of Finance and Economics (TUFE), China in 2011.