When our former president Dr APJ Abdul Kalam honours the creative children from around the country on Nov 11, 2011 at Ignite function at IIMA, organised by NIF and Honey Bee Network, he would underline the need once again for rethinking the pedagogy for future India. There is no doubt that children are generally born creative. Why should then schools and colleges work hard to stifle their creativity? Maybe because offices and companies otherwise will not have compliant, congruent and conformist workers.

Should we not worry if in the process we lose diversity, and sap the seeds of innovations that can make society more creative, collaborative and compassionate?

What are the lessons we learn from children innovations over the last decade or more? First lesson is that they are far less patient with the unsolved problems than our generation has been. We knew about various problems, but instead of trying to solve them, we learned to live with them. It did not bother us. Inventing reasons for not solving was easy. Shalini from Patna, Bihar saw that older people who have problem in walking use walkers but these are not flexible enough to support climbing on stairs. She conceived spring-loaded self-locking front legs on the walker so that when user pushes front legs on upper stairs and rear legs rest on lower stairs, the walker will be very stable. It can be taken to the next step easily and facilitate climbing.
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Second lesson is that children can easily connect separate solutions unconnected so far. Intelligence is often defined as the ability to connect the seemingly unconnectable. Mayank Walia from Jalandhar saw that we already had scanners which converted printed text into digital format. He also saw that an open source solution existed for converting digital text into speech. The breakthrough followed soon after. Once these were connected, we could easily help blind people read any book, not just Braille ones. I knew these two solutions as well but this thought did not occur to me. I had, maybe, learned to live with these problems but Mayank was impatient, thank God.

Third lesson is that we should not make feasibility an enemy of desirability while promoting creativity and innovations by children. If Mayank or many other children like Mohit from Sidhh, MP such as were expected to make a working model of every idea that they proposed, then they would imagine only what their existing repertoire of operational skills made possible. Mohit found what many readers must have noticed that people who are advised medicines sometimes forget to take them on time. He imagined a medicine box with a reminder alarm!

Fourth lesson is that many of the ideas that children think are about making life of elderly or women better, and reduce their drudgery. For example, Dhawla from Udupi suggested a solution for squeezing a bedsheet after washing. Every middle-class or lower class family has faced this problem but we never tried to find a solution. We know that the problems faced by women tend to be solved by formal institutions and even grassroots innovators less often than ones faced by men. In that context, this kind of sensitivity is highly appreciable.

Fifth lesson is that gender balance among children is much better than among adult innovators even at grassroots, and certainly at institutional level. Why should not we use this evidence of last so many years at NIF and Honey Bee Network to make a difference to the opportunities we provide to creative children, particularly girls?
Government is thinking about providing innovation scholarship to children and I hope that scheme will draw upon these lessons and not straightjacket the conditions for recognition, reward and resurgence of the creativity among Young Indians.

— The author is a professor at IIM-Ahmedabad