Ethics & Innovation

Excerpts from discourses by Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.

- Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

What is ethics?

Ethics is very simple – what you don’t want others to do to you, you don’t do to others. This is the base line of ethics.

Suppose you are a businessman, you have vendors and you have customers. You don’t want your vendors to cheat you, and you also shouldn’t cheat your customers. That is the base line.

Three types of innovation

Coming to innovation, I have observed three types of innovation.

Need based innovation

When there is a need, innovation springs up. I want to give you a small example. In a small village in India, there was water scarcity, and whatever little water available there was not drinkable. It was hard water. So, people started innovating – finding how they can filter this water and make it drinkable. They bought three pots and lined them with charcoal, sand and certain herbs and filtered the water – and finally got good drinkable water. Throughout the history of mankind, innovation has been part of human evolution. When there was need innovation started happening, whether it was for guns, archery, instruments, etc.

Knowledge based innovation

When science developed, knowledge-based innovations started flourishing, like internet, Skype, Facebook and the atomic bomb. There was no need for an atomic bomb – but it got developed through knowledge-based innovation as science evolved.

Accidental innovation

Someone just happened to discover it. Here again, I would say that there are two subdivisions.