Inclusive Innovation: Changing Actors and Agenda

This introductory chapter presents the spaces, forms and norms of exclusion mainly in and of rural India. It lays the foundation for explaining the evidence on how some of these exclusions have been overcome or changed to enable inclusive innovation, and how many forms and norms of exclusion persist. Theoretically, the state with its organized policies and programmes, and the formal organized knowledge actors are the fulcrum in both development economics and innovation systems studies. When exclusion in its multiple and mutually reinforcing forms becomes invisible or part of accepted norms of development, the nature of these actors and their agenda demand specific attention. Drawing upon the findings of a research project, which was that inclusive innovation demanded reform or major changes in the innovation system components, this chapter explores the conventional dichotomy between public and private policies and decision making, the capacity of the state and the market to direct and operationalize innovation and the role of organized science and technology (S&T) in the spatial diversity and informality of rural India. The agenda setting framing of development driven by industrialization and the supply of technologies for industrialization from formal S&T derive from ex-post analysis and theorization in development economics. This makes it impossible for the key actors—the state and formal S&T organizations— to engage with the massive informality, diversity of livelihoods and knowledge and the multiple exclusions in and of rural India. The ex-post theorization of development and approaches to organize science and technology for innovation for industrialization pay little attention to the history of economic development in the West. The state was one among several actors in the West, a big enabler of multiple sources of incremental and revolutionary technological changes and several institutional innovations. This introduction also points out that contrary to received wisdom from development studies and innovation systems framework, organized scientific research and the institutionalization of public and private corporate science did not lead to but were the consequences of the first and much of the second industrial revolutions. The chapter details the organization of the book and the key evidence presented in each chapter, concluding with a demand for democratic decentralized innovation capacities fostered by communities, formal S&T and the state.