The Department of International Studies and History, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), organised a talk by Dr. Saji Verghese on the topic: ‘Patents and Incubation: Ideas for the Future’ on 1st August 2019. Dr. Saji is from the Department of English, CHRIST and has been heavily involved in ICLI - INITIATIVE IN CREATIVE LEARNING FOR IMPACT.
The speaker intended to touch on 4 key areas:
- What is ICLI and what do they do?
- The rationale behind doing what they do
- Their philosophy and
- Their vision.
In order to convey these, he narrated 5 stories of individuals, who made a big difference by innovating simple yet impactful ideas, that would help make life a little better. He presented these stories with a picture and a narration.
Some of these success stories were of the Whatsapp founder, the redBus founder, the success story of Srikanth Bolla and the story of a stanford student who was assigned to innovate low cost incubators for villages in Karnataka.
After having narrated 5 success stories, born out of pure innovation, he highlighted that the pre-requisites for any innovation to occur were knowledge, imagination and attitude. Among the 3, he stressed that the individual’s attitude was of utmost importance.
Observation, he said, was the key to innovation and advised that one should always walk like a traveller, even in the most familiar places. He further elaborated this by sighting 3 instances where observation had indeed led to innovation. One instance was when students after observing that there was immense effort in marking the field with lime chalk manually, realized that there was a need to innovate and create a machine that was reasonably economical and mechanical. This led the students in creating a cost effective field marker, which reduced the time taken to mark the entire field from 1 hour and 30 minutes to 6 minutes.
The 2nd example was the innovation of a kiosk called GOnuts, which could be used by peanut vendors (Rohit and Sandeep) standing outside our university to multiply their business. This was also an innovation of the students of our university.
Finally, the last example that Dr. Saji gave, was from his own life, where he created straws made out of coconut leaves and received awards for his innovation at various competitions, in various committees and boards, within the nation as well as across the globe.
The speaker through these examples made an excellent statement of touching more lives with an innovation, as simple and small as it maybe. The talk was concluded with a vote of thanks.
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