This winter when I came across an appeal for donation of woollens and other material from an NGO on an online platform, instead of scrolling down listlessly, I was quick to devise a plan to source these from my locality and deliver them to their centre. The trigger behind the action came from Nikhil Inamdar’s powerful narration of the organization’s backstory that created an understanding of how small steps can lead to a big impact for communities at large, in ways which we clearly are unaware of and perhaps too immersed in our urbane, rushed lives to care for. 7 Sutras of Innovation brings together tales of eight such organizations which have won the ‘Innovation for India’ award by Marico Innovation Foundation, for initiating path-breaking innovations in their areas of operation, across various sectors. That they are able to create a meaningful social impact in their wake is the icing on the cake.
The author focuses on what can be said to be the second step in the current wave of start-up entrepreneurship in the country, namely ‘the scale-ups’. He chooses to trace the journeys of the eight award winners, who are innovators in their sector of operation and have acquired scale while managing to achieve a partnership between the seemingly divergent aims of achieving business profits and creating social impact.