Cleantech Innovation: What to expect from India

Spanning almost all industries and technologies, cleantech is notoriously amorphous by its very definition. And innovation is probably second only to strategy in the list of most nebulous (and hence abused) words in the business lexicon. So trying to structure an argument as to what type of cleantech innovation to expect from a country is, well, rather tricky.

For help, I turned to notes from one of the best courses I’ve ever taken: Management of Technology & Innovation taught by Wesley Sine at Cornell’s Johnson School. Any innovation has two components: technology and business. Innovations that survive are the ones with both components driven by market needs.

For example, let’s take solar PV. Companies like BP Solar have focused on incremental innovations to improve crystalline Silicon cell efficiency. In search of a step change in cost, Miasole and Nanosolar are pursuing discontinuous innovations in CIGS Thin Film technology. Concentrated PV companies like Solfocus and Cool Earth Solar on the otherhand are pairing available photovoltaics with smart optics design in architectural innovations.

I think it’s this final flavor of technological innovation that India’s capabilities are best suited for, and honestly, where there could be near-term opportunities to create significantly differentiated products/services.

More on this in the next post.

(c) Raghuram Dharmaraju, 2008.