Kerala Model of Innovation? Entrepreneurial Understandings of Innovation in a Southern Indian State

• In Event: Science, Technology and Innovation Policy in non-hegemonic countries: emulation, adaptation, creation

Abstract

The southern Indian state of Kerala presents a unique context from which to examine the adaptation, contestation, and transformation of innovation policies. On the one hand, Kerala has often been hailed as exemplary in terms of its achievements in healthcare provision and education even under relatively low- resource conditions (popularly referred to as the “Kerala Model [of development]”), owing to successive communist and socialist governments in the state since Indian independence. On the other hand, this has also resulted in low levels of industrialisation in the state and a heavy dependence of its economy on remittances from its overseas citizens (often based in Gulf countries).
It is against this backdrop that we examine the Kerala’s recent foray into cultivating entrepreneurial activity in the state in its attempts to benefit from immersing itself in the knowledge economy. In particular, we focus on how entrepreneurs within Kerala’s start-up ecosystem themselves perceive the need for “innovation.” Drawing on data collected through ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and media and documentary analysis, we demonstrate the particular ways in which global discourses of innovation get localized: Kerala’s tech-entrepreneurs seem to selectively draw on various discursive resources at different scales (local, regional, national, and transnational) in order to explain what innovation means to them in the context of Kerala. In conformity with this panel’s theme, we thus demonstrate how Kerala’s techno-entrepreneurial ecosystem, despite the global economic and business models at play, continues to also harbour unique, non-confirmative and localized understandings of innovation.

Authors

• Aalok Khandekar, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad

• Mohammed Raqib, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad