Innovation is where you find it

If I ask you to tell me the first picture that comes to mind when I say the word innovation, what image does this summon up for you? (OK this is nothing to worry about; it won’t tell me anything about your mental state. Trust me, I am a doctor. And don’t try to be too clever here - there are no right answers and no prizes. So what image appeared?)

Recent surveys with UK and international students have shown innovation equals high technology from their perspective. High technology here means aerospace, fast cars, robots and what are sometimes seen as boy’s toys, gizmos produced by M in James Bond. Funky, futuristic. Some drew scientists with test tubes, white coats and really bad hair (or none). Others wrote words down to add to their pictures. Nanotechnology. Biotechnology.

Any of these work for you? In my mind I always see a small, threadbare but immaculately clean Indian man behind a barrow of fruit in bright sunshine.

I met him on my first trip to Delhi. I was staying in an American chain hotel, hot and cold running everything and the same décor worldwide. He was a fixture on the grass verge opposite. By day he sold fruit and vegetables from an old wooden barrow. By night he slept on the barrow or on the grass, his washed shirt carefully hanging from the fence behind him which surrounded an enclave of apartments he could never afford. Not much to learn you might think. Certainly nothing about innovation.

But I learned a lot from him.

The first thing was always to challenge my assumptions. I judged him to be a poor man, desperately poor, probably illiterate and innumerate and eking out an existence with little hope of change. I imagined him as a city dweller without family connections since I never saw anyone help him with the barrow - whether he pushed it away to sell elsewhere or stood behind it and sold to passers by.

In fact, he was part of a very large extended family and community, based out in the village countryside. The first thing he did early every morning was talk to them on his mobile phone. The second thing was to receive photos of what was available today, which he forwarded to his customers in restaurants and hotels across the city. Deals were struck and the fruit and vegetables were brought in by a posse of relatives and others to deliver, freshly picked and packed, in time for preparation of meals for the day.

He had been doing this since acquiring the phone and had built up a large business, with a turnover that supported children to attend schools for the first time and improvements to the infrastructure of the village - and the lives of its inhabitants.