Location

Wiesner Room

Description

Over the past two decades, Prof. Gupta (Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad) has built a large social network, the Honey Bee Network, to recognize, respect, and reward grassroots innovators. The Honey Bee network has demonstrated that by building upon a resource in which poor people are rich—their knowledge— new paradigm of development can be unleashed. Today, his network has documented more than 60,000 grassroots innovations, created a structure for imparting the intellectual property rights, and has commercialized dozens of ideas.
Prof. Gupta also runs SRISTI (Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions), which was set up to provide organizational, intellectual and logistics support to the Honey Bee Network by systematically documenting, disseminating, and developing grassroots green innovations, providing intellectual property rights protection to grassroots innovators, working on the in situ and ex situ conservation of local biodiversity, and providing venture support to grassroots innovators. Lately SRISTI has been focusing on more concerted ways of hitherto neglected domains like women's knowledge systems, value addition through a natural product laboratory, using ICT to establish knowledge network, connecting innovators, traditional knowledge holders with centers of formal excellence, entrepreneurs, and innovators in education. Prof. Gupta is also the vice chairman of India's National Innovation Foundation. His work has been honored with the Padmashri, India's award for national service. His purpose is to make India innovative and generate a new model of poverty alleviation relying on innovation based enterprises.