Beyond Patents: Why Practical Wisdom Must Guide Innovation
India’s innovators show that affordable, inclusive breakthroughs are achieved through context and collaboration, not just IPR monopolies.
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Nimruji Jammulamadaka: IIM Calcutta
SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth | SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
Institutions: Ministry of Commerce and Industry | Ministry of Science and Technology
In the 1990s, India produced its first affordable Hepatitis B vaccine. Shut out of international licensing deals and subjected to public ridicule that countries like India “did not care for their children” and “came with begging bowls for subsidies,” local entrepreneurs and scientists drew on homegrown talent, diasporic expertise and sheer improvisation. The vaccine reached Indian markets at less than a tenth of global prices and, in the process, catalysed the creation of the country’s first biotech regulatory standards.
That story is more than a tale of ingenuity under constraint. It poses a question with global resonance: are strong intellectual property rights (IPR) really the only way to drive innovation? For decades, the orthodoxy has been that patents and monopolies fuel invention. Yet evidence from developing economies suggests this model often fails those who need solutions the most.
The Limits of the Patent Paradigm
The global patent system was designed to reward invention. But in poorer countries, it often locks innovation out rather than drawing it in. The World Trade Organization (WTO)’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement assumes innovators have abundant resources – capital, laboratories, trained personnel – to chase monopoly profits.
In resource-rich economies, strong IPR regimes do correlate with growth. But in the Global South, where research and development (R&D) is constrained by scarce funding and fragile institutions, patents often ring hollow. Protecting an idea is meaningless if there is no way to turn it into a working product.
Strict IPR can also deepen inequities. Pharmaceutical giants have sued governments over cheap generic anti-AIDS drugs, insisted on sovereign guarantees for COVID vaccines, and priced critical treatments at levels that exclude millions. Monopoly profits have repeatedly taken precedence over access.
The shortcomings are geopolitical too. Developing countries are often expected to “catch up” by licensing Western technologies. In reality, access is restricted and fees serve as barriers. The result is a hierarchy where the West remains the originator while others are consigned to wait in what historian Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “waiting room of history.” Innovators felt this personally: a motivation for action was rejecting what one researcher called ghulami (intellectual dependence).
Innovation as Practical Wisdom
If patents often exclude, what kind of innovations promote inclusion? One alternative is practical wisdom – what Aristotle called phronesis. The idea is straightforward: making good judgments in specific situations, guided by ethics, experience and context.
Applied to innovation, practical wisdom values improvisation, intuition and tacit know-how. It allows for leaps of reasoning across gaps and adapts to circumstances rather than rigid plans. Most importantly, it treats affordability and dignity as part of the problem itself, not late-stage concessions or charity.
This approach is well suited to resource-constrained settings. It lets innovators move fluidly between intellectual property regimes – sometimes proprietary, sometimes common or communal – choosing whatever best serves the challenge.
India’s Stories of Practical Wisdom
Three examples from Indian medicine show what innovation looks like when affordability, not monopoly, defines the challenge.
One is the Simple Limbal Epithelial Transplant (SLET) at the LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad. Standard stem cell transplants for corneal blindness required costly labs and equipment. Faced with prohibitive expenses, Dr. Virender Sangwan and his colleagues reimagined the process. His practical reasoning suggested that the eye which naturally had all nutrition and conditions could effectively be a substitute for the lab equipment he did not have. Instead of seeking patents, they shared the technique openly. The result: costs fell from its European comparator, Holoclar®, which cost upwards of several thousand Euros, to about USD 200 in India – a reduction of more than 90 percent. This knowledge-sharing amplified the reach through training and new collaborations.
The second is the indigenous Hepatitis B vaccine, Shanvac. Excluded from international licensing deals, entrepreneur Varaprasad Reddy and scientist Gita Sharma drew on local and diaspora talent, sourcing yeast strains from sympathetic collaborators. They focused on a value-driven outcome: making a vaccine available at INR 50 per dose, at less than one-tenth of global prices. The vaccine was eventually offered to UNICEF at 23 cents when competition was selling for over USD 15. They also worked alongside regulators for over a year to co-create India’s first biotech drug-testing and approval standards.
A third case comes from low-cost ophthalmic equipment. Motivated by his own frustrating experience as a patient, Dr. Ashutosh Ricchariyya saw the high cost of imports as “profit-driven badmashi (mischief and notoriety)”. His solution was to re-engineer the equipment from a hardware system to a software system with auxiliary hardware. This strategic shift leveraged India’s computational capabilities and provided diagnostic devices for under INR 3,000, compared with imports at INR 300,000. Overcoming domestic inertia and professional rivalries proved as crucial as circumventing foreign monopolies.
Together, these cases point to a different model of innovation: context-driven, affordability-led, and rooted in knowledge sharing rather than hoarding.
From Products to Ecosystems
The impact of these innovations stretched far beyond the laboratory. SLET created a knowledge commons that spread rapidly among practitioners. The vaccine effort seeded regulatory standards that endure. Low-cost devices forced hospitals and universities to confront their own inertia.
This ecosystem effect contrasts with the isolate-and-protect logic of patents. While patents lock up knowledge, practical wisdom encourages diffusion, collaboration and institutional learning. It builds capacity for long-term problem-solving rather than one-off inventions.
Lessons for Policy
For policymakers, the message is clear. Simply importing Western IPR models will not work in contexts where resources and institutions differ so sharply. Copying “best practice” often backfires, reinforcing dependency instead of independence.
The obstacles are not only external. The Indian cases show that internal inertia and entrenched interests can suffocate innovation as effectively as global monopolies. Policy must confront these domestic barriers too.
Equally, innovators often shift pragmatically between property regimes. A rigid insistence on monopoly protection misses this flexibility and risks stifling problem-solving.
A practical roadmap can be as follows:
First, policymakers should move beyond monopoly-centred models and embrace a mix of private, common and communal property regimes, depending on context. This skillful combination helps organisations overcome resource disadvantages and create new resource bases.
Second, affordability and social value must be built into the definition of innovation challenges, from the start, not added later as a charitable discount.
Third, rigid, top-down planning should be avoided and instead adaptive rethinking should be supported as circumstances evolve.
Fourth, cross-sector collaborations should be encouraged – between government, civil society, universities and even sympathetic global partners to co-create rules and open up monopoly assets based on public needs.
These lessons emerge not from theory but from lived practice: Indian innovators navigating scarcity, bureaucracy and geopolitics.
The Real Protection We Need
The debate over IPR is, ultimately, about the kind of societies we want to build. Patents protect profits, but they do not always protect people. Practical wisdom offers a way to reorient innovation towards dignity, equity and resilience.
The future of innovation will not be decided only in courtrooms or corporate boardrooms. It will be decided on whether societies choose ownership or access, exclusion or inclusion. The path worth building is that where wisdom, not monopoly, sets the agenda.
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Author:
The discussion in this article is based on the author’s working paper on the subject. Views are personal.