Fostering an innovation economy in India will not only encourage make-in-India but will also keep the value added in India. It will create jobs and utilise the demographic potential. Encouraging innovation is not just important for growth, but a national imperative in the new knowledge economy. Our research programme is focused on understanding and measuring innovation in the Indian context and investigating the role that strategic policy formulation can play in supporting it. A key aspect is to study the role played by intellectual property laws, competition policy and other institutions in defining the innovation ecosystem.
Rapid advances in digital technologies have changed the landscape of developmental interventions and policies. Digitisation can lower transaction costs, raise efficiency and improve labour productivity. It also promotes social and economic inclusion and its benefits go beyond pure economic returns. E-governance has been adopted as a mantra to improve public service delivery. However, with vast chunks of population still undigitised, challenges remain. Our focus is to understand how technology is being used and can be used to overcome developmental challenges. What are the barriers to adoption? How do individuals and institutions relate to technology and how does adoption change their lives and behaviour? .
With half our population between the ages of 15 and 44, India is sitting on a huge demographic resource to take advantage of a knowledge-based economy. But this demographic dividend only pays if this population has the education and skills required to succeed in the new economy. At present India has a poorly educated and poorly skilled labour force. What is it that can be done to improve the quantity and quality of education and skilling of our youth? Our programme aims to understand the reasons for the current levels of human capital and design and test solutions targeted
at improving these levels.
There is considerable interest among development practitioners and policy makers about evidence based policy making. Impact evaluations assess whether or not a programme or policy has achieved its intended result. They may also test alternative strategies to achieve those results. This generates a body of evidence that can vastly improve the quality of developmental interventions. We have carried out and are currently engaged in impact evaluations of a varied nature. We use both macro techniques, such as Social Accounting Matrices (SAM) to evaluate policy impact and mixed methods micro techniques to evaluate the impact of various interventions. Our approach to impact evaluations is as researchers with the aim of improving the design of interventions.
