From Curiosity to Creation: Can the Right Environment Build a Nation of Innovators?

Can the right environment transform an ordinary citizen into an innovator? This is the central experiment driving PARAM Foundation, a purpose driven organisation working to create a collaborative ecosystem around science, history and culture. Its ParSEC (Param Science Experience Centre) initiative seeks to make science more experiential through interactive exhibits, hands on exploration, workshops and maker led activities, encouraging learners to question, experiment and build. Since launching its first centre in Jayanagar in January 2024, ParSEC has welcomed more than 75,000 visitors and built a growing network of educators, researchers, makers and institutions. As PARAM Foundation expands its experiential learning ecosystem, it is also exploring how education can foster agency, creativity and the confidence to solve real world problems. 

In this conversation with TheCSRUniverse, Inavamsi Enaganti, Director, Science and Innovation and Joint CEO, ParSEC by PARAM, discusses the future of learning, industry collaboration, CSR, skilling and the Foundation’s ambition to nurture a culture of innovation rooted in India.

Read the full interview below.

Q&A

Q. PARAM Foundation operates at the intersection of science, culture, history, and innovation. What inspired this multidisciplinary vision, and why is such an integrated approach important for the future of learning?

A. We are running an experiment. The hypothesis: an ordinary citizen can become an innovator.

Not a genius. Not a prodigy. An ordinary person, given the right environment, becomes someone who builds.

We often repeat the story that ideas come from lone geniuses. They don't. Ideas occur at collisions. Put an artist, a biologist, and an engineer in one room and something happens that none of them could produce alone. The artist sees form the engineer is blind to. The biologist knows a billion years of solutions the artist never imagined. Modern education keeps these three people in separate buildings and wonders why breakthroughs are rare.

PARAM is built to engineer collisions. Science, history, culture, and innovation under one roof, on purpose, because that is where the future is actually made.

Q. What are the biggest gaps in India's current learning ecosystem that PARAM Foundation is trying to address?

A. The biggest gap is not access. It is agency.

We have taught a generation to answer questions. We have not taught them to ask any. A child walks in curious and walks out able to pass exams, and somewhere in between we surgically remove the instinct to wonder. That is the real dropout crisis, and no attendance sheet captures it.

The second gap is geographic. In India, cross fifty kilometres and the language changes, the food changes, the clothing changes, and most importantly the problems change. Yet we train everyone against the same distant template, usually one imported from somewhere else. A person in one district cannot solve a problem on their own street because we never taught them that their street was worth solving for.

We seek to close both gaps the same way: hand people the tools, the space, and the permission to build for their own world.

Q. Curiosity, experimentation, and inquiry are central to your philosophy. Why are these skills becoming increasingly important in a world shaped by AI and rapid technological change?

A. Because AI has made knowing things cheap.

For all of history, the person who knew the answer had power. That era ended. A machine now knows more facts than any human ever will, instantly, for free. If your entire education was a race to memorise, you have been training your whole life for a race that no longer has a prize.

What survives is the uniquely human part: the ability to ask a question no one has asked, to sit in the discomfort of a problem with no known solution, to take an informed risk and be wrong and go again. Curiosity is the ignition. Experimentation is the engine. The machine can answer, but it cannot yet care enough to ask. That gap is where humans will live and work for the next century, and we intend to help make India a global leader in it.

Q. How do you define and measure success when the outcomes you seek, such as curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, and innovation, are often difficult to quantify?

A. We stopped pretending you can put a number on wonder, and started watching for its symptoms.

Does the learner come back when nobody is making them? Do they pick up a tool without being told? Do they argue with the instructor, build the thing that wasn't assigned, break something trying to understand it? Those are the vital signs of a mind that has woken up, and they are visible if you are willing to look.

The long measure is simpler and harder. Ten years from now, did this person build something? Did they solve a problem in their own community, start something, teach someone else, refuse to accept “that's just how it is”? We are not optimising for a test score in March. We are optimising for a citizen who innovates for the rest of their life. If we get that right, the numbers were never the point.

Q. Industry leaders frequently highlight a gap between academic learning and real-world readiness. What role can experiential learning play in bridging this divide and preparing young people for the future of work?

A. The future workforce will solve problems that don't exist yet, using tools that haven't been invented yet. You cannot lecture someone into that capability. You have to let them build.

But readiness is not only technical. An innovator who understands the equation but not the person they are building for makes elegant things nobody needs. So we put science next to history, engineering next to culture, prototyping next to ethics, because a real problem is never just a technical problem.

Here is the ambition underneath it. India is very good at “Make in India.” We want “Design in India.” The entire lifecycle of a product, from the first sketch of an idea to the thing in someone's hands, conceived here, built here, for here. That requires people who have actually made something, failed, and made it better. That is what an experiential learning space produces. It is not simply about transferring information. It is about building the person.

Q. PARAM Foundation has built partnerships across academia, industry, and the broader community. What have been your key learnings from creating a collaborative ecosystem, and how can industry-academia partnerships better prepare youth for emerging opportunities?

A. The biggest lesson: partnership is not sponsorship.

Writing a cheque and getting a logo on a banner is not collaboration, it is a transaction, and transactions do not change anyone. The partnerships that matter are co-creation. Industry brings live problems and real technology. Historians and artists bring the context that keeps innovation human. Researchers bring rigour. When those worlds actually build something together instead of sitting on the same stage, the learner in the middle gets an education no single institution could give them.

We are not trying to build a good local organisation with good local partners. We want to build an organisation that can stand on the global stage alongside leading institutions and creative organisations, while doing it from India, with Indian collaborators, and focused on Indian problems. That bar changes who you partner with and why.

Q. What does a successful and sustainable skilling ecosystem look like, and what sets it apart from conventional training initiatives?

A. Conventional training asks: what job exists today, and how do I fill it? By the time the batch graduates, the job has often changed. You are always one step behind, forever.

A real ecosystem does not train for a job. It builds the capacity to learn, unlearn, and relearn for a lifetime, so people can stay ahead of change rather than constantly chasing it. That means science and technology, yes, but also history, culture, entrepreneurship, ethics, and the plain confidence to face a problem nobody has solved.

The difference is the goal. Training aims to produce an employee. We aim to produce an innovator, someone who does not wait for a job to be created but creates one, for themselves and for others.

Q. As CSR increasingly moves toward long-term capacity building, how can corporate partners contribute more meaningfully to bridging the gap between education and industry requirements while strengthening future-ready skills?

A. What we need from CSR is patient capital. Long-term capital for long-term experiments.

Too much CSR still operates like impatient money. It funds a programme for a year, demands a report, counts the heads, and moves on. But you cannot build an innovator on an annual cycle any more than you can grow a forest in a quarter. The things that actually matter here, curiosity, scientific temper, the confidence to build, compound slowly and invisibly before they compound fast. Impatient money never stays long enough to see the return.

We are running an experiment: can an ordinary citizen be transformed into an innovator? That experiment needs backers who understand that the most valuable outcomes take years, who are willing to fund the makerspace, the science centre, the innovation lab, the educators, and the access, and then hold their nerve while the compounding happens.

This is not charity and it is not a grant cycle. It is experiment capital placed on a long-term experiment, and the corporate partners who think this way will not be buying photographs for a report. They will be building a nation's talent pipeline, and creating value that can compound over a generation rather than being measured within a single funding cycle.

Q. How can experiential learning spaces help democratise access to advanced learning infrastructure, innovation opportunities, and career pathways for students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds?

A. Talent is distributed evenly. Opportunity is not. That single mismatch is the greatest waste of human potential in this country.

There are children right now, in villages and small towns, with the potential to become a great engineer, scientist or founder, who will never touch a single tool that would reveal it. Not because they lack ability, but because the infrastructure lives three hundred kilometres away in an elite institution that was never built with them in mind.

An experiential learning space is an equaliser. It puts the real tools, the real machines, the real mentors within reach of the child who was never supposed to have them. And because India's problems change every fifty kilometres, the point is not to bus everyone to one central temple of innovation. It is to seed these spaces everywhere, so every community can grow its own innovators to solve its own problems. Potential decides who rises, not postcode.

Q. What is your vision for PARAM Foundation over the next decade, and what role do you hope it will play in shaping India's innovation and learning ecosystem?

A. Our goal is simple to say and audacious to attempt: to turn every park and every kitchen into a lab.

Innovation does not only happen in a cleanroom with a billion-rupee machine. It happens wherever a curious person decides to experiment with what is in front of them. A kitchen is a chemistry lab. A park is a field station in ecology and physics. A grandmother's recipe is a thousand years of iteration. If we can help people see the laboratory that already surrounds them, we unlock a nation of innovators without waiting for a nation of infrastructure.

And we reject the idea that innovation is science alone. Culture, history, and philosophy are not decoration on top of invention, they are its source code. The questions a civilisation asks, the way it sees time, self, and nature, shape what it chooses to build. India has been asking some of the deepest questions humanity has ever posed. That heritage is not a museum piece. It is raw material for the future.

So the second half of our vision is to take Indian ideas and Indian philosophies to the world, not as folklore, but as living contributions to how humanity innovates. We want the world to look to India not only for engineers and code, but for a way of thinking about problems.

And we are not thinking small about where this goes. We are looking at an experience centre in New York's Times Square and one in a Dubai mall. But we will not stop until we have an experience centre on Mars.

Underneath all of it is one belief. India does not have a talent problem. It has an environment problem. Turn every park and every kitchen into a lab, root that lab in India's own philosophy and history, and a generation of innovators walks out into the world carrying ideas that could only have come from here. That is the experiment. We intend to pursue it.