January 6, 2023
Planting the Seed
The University of Washington is widely known as one of the most innovative universities in the country but sometimes innovative projects and ideas are difficult to discover. In all my experiences at UW, I have seen many instances where innovation was specifically encouraged and visible and where innovation was hidden and hard to spot with an untrained eye. Coming into the GCIL experience, I was still unsure where innovation really came from and how to cultivate it. To be completely honest, I was also unsure about how much innovation we would
end up seeing while in Bangalore because it was still a place I couldn’t really grasp or picture in my head yet. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wonder about this for very long. On our first day of activities with organizations and startups, I was in complete awe while learning about the issues and solutions that each group faced. First, we did a walking tour with Biome around Jakkur lake and heard about the innovative ways Bangalore is filtering water for both household use and lake restoration. Then, we got to see the lab of Rise Bionics and hear a presentation from the founder, Arun, about the history of the company and how they created a process to create sockets for prosthetic limbs in an incredibly accurate way while also decreasing the manufacture time from multiple weeks to multiple hours. All of the issues we heard about have a large influence on the lives of various populations in and around Bangalore and are all complex in multiple dimensions. The solutions to these issues were no easy feat to create, and understanding the complexity and effort it took for these organizations to stand up to these problems and create advanced solutions was really humbling and inspiring. I can definitively say that, after one day, my perspective on innovation has changed a lot and I have been able to see innovation discovered in new ways. After hearing about Arun describe his inspiration for Rise Bionics by observing the furniture at his sister’s wedding, I’m starting to really see how inspiration for new things can be nuanced and unexpected, and how taking advantage of it as it comes can lead to great things. On top of all of this, this was just day one! I can’t imagine how many more innovative ideas and solutions lay in the days ahead as we move on to other activities and organizations, but I know I will not be disappointed. While leaving Rise Bionics, Arun said that what he wanted was to plant the seed of innovation and creativity in us, and I believe that by the end of this trip we will all have flourishing innovation fauna stemming from this seed.
