Peter Drucker says, "There are only two revenue centres in the company ...marketing and innovation. All the other centres are costs" Sure, they are necessary.

A company cannot move forward without them. But marketing and innovation are ‘critical' No wonder, now so many companies are putting an emphasis on innovation.

One realises that, although we need far more innovation than we presently see, there are ‘instinctively innovative' people all over the world, who are involved with doing both complex and simple things. There are young people from advanced countries like USA. and there are young people from developing countries like India; and there must be many such all over the world.

I was particularly impressed by the story of Raina Jain, a 16 year old from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA who is dedicated to finding ‘medical miracles'. Her project won her the 2010 International BioGENEius Challenge and an invitation to meet President Obama. Over a 3 year period, she has developed a glass, which, inside the body, reacts with body fluids and turns into bone. Her research examines how surface roughness can impact the way cells respond to it, so you can get the best cell response and the fastest bone formation. She says that her quest started, when she heard about a laboratory that had been working on glass implants and she thought that it was strange to put something like glass (which can cut tissue) into the body to heal it.

There is another story of 18 year old Masha Nazeem, who lives in a small town in Tamil Nadu. She saw her father melting red lac over a naked flame. Considering it dangerous, she developed a contraption to heat the lac without a flame and pour it on the envelope so that the seal can now be pressed over it. She now has a patent on the ‘flameless seal maker'.

Having done this, she looked at the needs of the elderly at railway platforms (her own experience in Japan, where she lugged a suitcase everywhere without any help) She developed a luggage carrier on wheels, where the platform can be lifted to the level of the compartment floor and the bags rolled into the compartment without the need to carry them. She has patented this ‘mechanical porter'. Masha has 8 innovations to her name so far including a burglar alarm and a conveyor belt system.

Madam Curie, the famed scientist was once invited to inaugurate a large, new, well-equipped research centre in France. When she saw the luxurious building she was visibly upset. She was asked, whether she not happy to see such state of the art facilities, at last, for the promotion of science? Her reply was simple "To do great research, you do not need grandiose buildings with well laid out gardens. You need creativity, passion, hard work, and the human spirit and of course some necessary equipment and facilities."

These two young girls Raina and Masha, seem to prove Madame Curie right in her perspective of ‘innovation'

Walter Vieira is a senior management consultant. The views expressed in this column are that of the author only.