How Creativity and Design Thinking Will Push India's Growth Story Forward

The Indian innovation story is turning pages into chapters and yet, we are only at the beginning of the book. We have grown to be the world's third largest start-up ecosystem, with numerous ideas turning into start-ups each day.

But with creativity on our side, we can only grow bigger and better. Radha Kapoor Khanna, founder of DOIT Creations, is rooting for creativity and design thinking as the pillars of India's innovation journey.

At a recent TedX event, she took to stage and shared some key highlights of her journey, the inspiration behind taking up design thinking and her beliefs on how that is set to change India's growth path.

You Can All Do It

We have all heard about Make in India, which pushes us to design in India and Build India. Khanna believes in this and says that age no bar, we are all out there to create. She questions – where do you see yourself in the next 5 years? And if we answer it truthfully, it will most probably be – doing something we love.

She believes that creativity and innovation are going to be the game changers of all future careers. Be it data architects, AI therapists, blockchain specialists or even emoji designers, it's all possible today. She stated that up to 15 per cent of the Fortune 100 companies have designers as founders. "Having built innovation platforms here, I have come to realize that we are in the midst of a creative renaissance. Design centric focus has become the core of every business. India is moving closer towards its dream of becoming the creative capital of the world," she said.

In India, 8.1 million jobs required to maintain a healthy employment rate. And how do we go about it? Khanna explained that India needs a creative workforce demand and hence her goal is to build incubation and innovation platforms to fill that supply.

A Career Out of Creativity

As a young girl, Khanna remembers spending time at Disney World and the creative imagination that sparked within her and how learning was made creative there. It was then that she knew that she was ready to jump into the world of creativity. "That's why I chose design as my career path even though it was not a conventional choice," she said.

She studied at the University of Arts, London and then moved to the Parsons School of Design, New York. It was there that she learnt how to solve real world challenges through design thinking. "As a student for my thesis, I decided to choose a project of societal impact to bridge the communication gap between rural and urban India," she said.

Building DICE - Design, Innovation Creativity and Entrepreneurship

It was then that she realized that she can impact lives through design and decided to dig deeper and study unusual businesses and the way they were disrupting the world. "I travelled extensively to the hubs of innovation. The common theme at these places was fearless innovation. I was ready to take this creative energy back to my country," she said.

By 2027, she states that we are set to have the largest workforce in the world. "At the breakneck speed at which India was growing – I decided to connect the dots between Design, Innovation Creativity and Entrepreneurship. Currently we are evangelizing this in India's innovation districts – the idea was to build an ecosystem to help nurture future designers and creators and help them run their idea by giving them resources and capital pool," she said.

Being at the epicenter of these innovations on a daily basis, she looks at combining experiential learning with creativity with an aim to bring innovation to masses. "The common goal that we follow is every good design may not make commercial sense but going forward every good business will have to make great design sense. Intuitive, empathetic and with a non-linear approach, this is new age education and design thinking way. Now with DICE reaching to people, it's time for us to put India on the global creative map. Let's change the narrative from what's in it for me to what's in it for the nation," she said.