Challenges and Solutions for Mapping Innovation in a Large Emerging Economy: Experiences from India

This paper is an outcome of my experience as a team member of the Euro-India Innovation mapping project. The project set out to map India’s IT Innovativeness over two years from January 2008-to December 2009. Here I bring to the fore the different methodologies that we reviewed in order to implement the innovation mapping project and our realization that each methodology in itself though useful may not be sufficient to address the complexity of the subject matter due to the vastness of India and its emerging nature. I outline some of the challenges faced by us when designing a methodology for mapping innovation in a large emerging economy. I discuss some solutions and report on how we solved the problem only to be faced with newer challenges. A methodological design is a challenging endeavor in the normal of time, when it comes to doing the same in a large emerging economy the problems becomes compounded. I highlight some of these problems and discuss some solutions in this paper. I conclude this paper with some insights proposing a mix methodology approach has been useful in addressing the challenges of data collection in emerging economies using our Indian experience as a backdrop to our findings.