Dr. Ajay Kumar

I think we must incorporate a course on innovation, processes of innovation, intellectual property because it is important as scientific writing, and communicating science if not more than them. I suggest combining “Innovation, Intellectual Property and Entrepreneurship” as one skill course in because Innovation, Intellectual Property Rights and Entrepreneurship are all interlinked. We need to orient students in the first Sem itself on innovations. Idea to add this course is to train students to innovate in addition to generating papers. Can they come up with an innovation in all these 8-10 Semesters? 4-5 years is a good time to innovate. Instead of focusing on dissertations, if two-three students work on some innovative technologies/processes/designs from Sem 2 or 3 itself. I hope they can at least come up with some demonstrative, innovative outcomes. It is not just about teaching them individually, but a specialized orientation throughout is required and a beginning must be based on the strong theoretical foundations of innovations.

Innovation is envisioned in the NEP 2020 as one of the most important components of Curriculum right from School Level. Page No. 1, Para 4 of the NEP 2020 states “Indeed, with the quickly changing employment landscape and global ecosystem, it is becoming increasingly critical that children not only learn, but more importantly learn how to learn. Education thus, must move towards less content, and more towards learning about how to think critically and solve problems, how to be creative and multidisciplinary, and how to innovate, adapt, and absorb new material in novel and changing fields”. Further, NEP 2020 document of 60 plus pages mentions the word Innovate more than 50 times. NEP 2020 clearly and specifically positions Innovation at the center of the Science and Technology Curriculum from Primary to Higher Education and Research Level. NEP envisages an education system to be Innovation orientated rather than traditional rote learning.