Adobe India Bets Big on Social Transformation with Grassroots Innovation Challenge

Based on the tenets of the Digital India initiative by Government of India, Adobe organized Grassroots Innovation Challenge – a first-of-its-kind initiative by the company aimed at encouraging its over 5,200 employees in India to collaborate, ideate and conceptualise innovative digital solutions to combat social challenges prevailing in India. This unique program, which received close to 600 idea submissions from Adobe employees, was concluded in a judging ceremony presided by Dr. Mahesh Sharma, Union Minister for Tourism & Culture, Government of India in Adobe’s Sector 132 campus in Noida. The jury panel also included - Aditya Sharma , Bramhanand Jha , Arnab Kumar and R Raghunandan .

The idea ’Machine Learning-led Intelligent Core Judicial Solution’ created to optimize the use of precious judicial bandwidth in India was announced as the winner of Grassroots Innovation Challenge.  The solution was a Machine Learning and Neuro-Linguistic Programming-based (NLP) service for judgement assistance and intelligent case dossiers. It is aimed at solving the unique challenges faced by the judicial system in the world’s largest common law system. The winning team will be receiving prize money from the company for the proposed concept’s implementation towards aiding social transformation in India.

“Adobe has always been synonymous with creativity and innovative products that bring ideas to life. Towards this, we take pride in our employees’ exceptional talent, innovation focused mindset, and commitment to delivering unique digital solutions to create experiences for consumers of our products. In line with this, we launched Grassroots Innovation Challenge – a unique program designed to give over 5,200 Adobe India employees the opportunity to leverage Adobe tools to come up with digital solutions to combat India’s social challenges”, said Shanmugh Natarajan, Managing Director, Adobe Systems India. “We are thrilled to see over 500 innovative entries submitted for the program, and the passion demonstrated by Adobe India employees in supporting social challenges close to their hearts. We congratulate the winners, and look forward to helping them realize their technology visions towards driving real impact on India’s social transformation agenda”.

Adobe India’s Grassroots Innovation Challenge received submissions from employees across social themes of Citizen Engagement, Digitization, Smart Cities, Government Workflow and Process Simplification, Education, Tourism, Women & Child Welfare, Health & Family Welfare, Agriculture and Monitoring & Evaluation Framework. Apart from the winner, Adobe India will be awarding prize money to top 10 ranked entries to facilitate implementation of the most innovative ideas.

The process required the participants to form teams to ideate on the concepts. These teams were offered guidance by pre-identified mentors and thereafter, ideas were screened by a qualified panel of judges. At the incubate (second) stage, the shortlisted teams were to develop a next level model, solution document, architecture or prototype within one week. In the final phase, all ideas from the incubate stage were reviewed by the esteemed jury for impact analysis.