Financing and Management of Innovation in India: New Paths for Green Innovation

India is a fascinating example of an emerging economy which adapts the concept of innovation-based growth to its own specific economic and cultural context. Innovation in India has attracted growing interest among researchers, with a steady increase in the number of published works on the subject and in the number of their citations. The present paper provides a meta-review of the literature on the financing and management of innovation and green innovation in India. The novelty of the analysis is severalfold. Firstly, we highlight the coexistence of universal and India-specific features in the types of innovation and the practices of financing and management of innovation in the country. Secondly, the paper not only summarizes a range of bibliometric surveys and a large number of methodological and empirical papers on innovation in India, but also reviews a unique series of papers associated with the World Management Survey, which compare and contrast managerial practices in India with those in a large number of developed and emerging economies. Our analysis shows that India follows a number of universal approaches to the financing and management of innovation, and that parallels can be established between innovative IT companies in India and Japan. However, India uses many practices that are deemed inefficient in developed countries: the government, not the private sector, is the major supplier of R&D expenditure and green investment; family ownership is a driver of (not an obstacle to) innovation; there is a focus on low-income consumers; and cost-cutting rather than quality competition is the primary innovation technique. In conclusion, we link the India-specific innovation path to various opportunities for fostering green growth in the country.