Nirmalya Banerjee, Business Head, BMGI, speaking at the Manufacturing Innovation Conclave

Banerjee reinforced that innovation can make this possible and open up possibilities for developing multiple alternatives for carrying out the same solution. He signed off by sharing that India has been a follower by executing and scaling up products innovated elsewhere, but it is time for India to innovate, leverage available frameworks and realise the aspiration of 'Make in India'.

In the era of start-ups and innovation appearing to be originating from smaller organisations, how do large organisations manage innovation? Dr. Kurichi Kumar, Head of Engineering, Rolls Royce India Pvt Ltd, shared the practices Rolls Royce adopts to manage innovation. He shared the sourcing of ideas through well networked universities around the world and collaboration with suppliers that fits into the structure of Generate - Develop - Review - Select process for innovation that is managed through a portal.

How can diversity bring about Innovation? Sandeep Sinha, Chief Operating Officer, Cummins India Ltd., answered this question by narrating the practices in his organisation that has worked and has been delivering results. Bringing out various dimensions of innovation like people, environment, process and engineering, Sinha highlighted specific examples of innovations to make it easier for women to work on the shop-floor.

Dr. H Purushotham Chairman & Managing Director, National Research Development Corporation (NRDC), Government of India, shared the perspective and initiatives of the entity towards making the 'Make in India' initiative a reality.

The initiatives he shared included offerings that include providing financial assistance for prototyping, support on filing patents and generating IPRs. He shared how his organisation made it possible to have over 2,000 technologies with facilitating close to 5,000 license agreements.

Presiding as the chairperson for the next session, Dr. Jitendra K Das, Director, FORE School of Management, welcomed the guests to share their thoughts on leveraging human brain power to create and incubate ideas to develop potential solutions. He emphasised on how innovation cannot be structured or instructed, but is an evolving process.

Dr. Gautam Shroff, Vice President & Chief Scientist, Tata Consultancy Services, in his talk about the leadership role in creating innovative organisation, stated innovation was critical to survival and is an organisation wide culture across the organisation and not restricted to the research and development department.

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