User:Nif~enwiki

National Innovation Foundation

NIF is setup by Department of Science and Technology in February, 2000, with the main goal of providing institutional support in scouting, spawning, sustaining and scaling up grassroots green innovations and helping their transition to self supporting activities.

The foundation has a Governing Council chaired by Dr. R. A. Mashelkar, former Secretary, DSIR and former Director General, CSIR. Dr. Anil K. Gupta, Professor, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and President, SRISTI is the Executive Vice Chairperson of NIF.

For the last eighteen years the Honeybee Network and Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions (SRISTI) have been scouting innovations by farmers, artisans, women, etc. at the grassroots level.

Gujarat Grassroots Innovations Augmentation Network (GIAN) scales up innovations, from the Honey Bee database of innovations, through value additions in innovations to sustain creativity and ethics of experimentation. GIAN was conceived at the International Conference on Creativity and Innovation at Grassroots (ICCIG), jointly organized by IIM Ahmedabad and SRISTI during January 1997 and was set up on March 1, 1997 with support from Government of Gujarat, IIM Ahmedabad and SRISTI.

The Honey Bee database of 65,000 innovations, collected and documented by various collaborators all over the country, would be part of the National Register of Innovations to be managed and supported by NIF.