Bangladesh's journey towards innovation

Our people live with cyclones and floods and still start businesses and tinker with machines. Yet the Global Innovation Index2025 places us 106thof 139 economies (overall score 21). We do well on creative outputs (86th; 18.1) and infrastructure (90th; 36.4) but lag on market sophistication (96th; 29), knowledge and technology outputs (99th; 13.2), institutions (109th; 33.9), business sophistication (129th; 19.5), andmost painfully, human capital and research (133rd; 12.8). Bangladeshis are innovative every day, but the system that turns resourcefulness into competitiveness is weak.
Street-level ingenuity: The Bangla Tesla: Street-level inventiveness tells the same story in a different way. Around 2007, rickshaw-pullers retrofitted pedal rickshaws with cheap motors and lead-acid batteries. The result is a vast e-rickshaw ecosystem that moves tens of millions daily and multiplies drivers' incomes four to five times. But informality brought risks-- flimsy frames, unsafe speeds and toxic recycling. However, the state is catching up with BUET-approved designs, zoned licensing, driver training and regulated charging are rolling out. Standardisation can preserve earning power while cutting crashes and pollution, the right path to turn a survival technology into an exportable product someday sooner if the national vision is set right and political commitments are there.

Agricultural innovation: The perennial rice: In the fields, frugal science is quietly advancing. At a private university-- IUBAT, a perennial rice line is under trial that you plant once and harvest for years. The agronomy is simple but transformative, less tilling, lower seed costs, reduced water uses and fewer cash shocks for smallholders. If yields hold and resilience improves, extension services should prioritise this line in coastal and drought-prone Upazilas. Perennial varieties will not defeat salinity or floods on their own, but they mesh neatly with our adaptation agenda and with the way rural families actually make decisions about risk and investment.

Factory-floor innovation: Now to the factory floor. The textile value chain shows how structured innovation converts ideas into cash flow. For example, Textile Today Innovation Hub's documented projects show savings, such as, 21-30% less steam, 15-20% less water and 22-23% less power in dark-shade knit dyeingworth Taka 12-15 million a yearplus 86.82% faster changeovers saving Taka 8-10 million a year and a black-shade programme that cuts water and steam use for multiple factories. Across mills, TTIH reports 250 completed projects, evidence that factory-floor innovation can be organised and scaled. There are many unsung heroes like TTIH, who could change technological landscape of Bangladesh if nurtured properly by the government.

Why Bangladesh lags in innovation competitiveness: Why, then, does Bangladesh remain innovation-uncompetitive? First, we innovate in fragments. Disaster risk reduction works because policy, technology and communities are wired together, most sectors lack that tissue. Pilots abound, but few platforms certify, finance, measure and scale them. Second, the human-capital pipeline is thin and disconnected from firms. The GII's weakest pillar, human capital and researchmirrors campus realities-- underfunded labs, fragmented research centres established by public universities and weak incentives for collaboration. When departments cannot sustain post-PhDs & post-docs, shared equipment or applied projects, firms must learn by doing with little scientific backup.

Third, the financing model is upside-down. Peer economies help innovation-oriented firms any sector's (not only IT firms) prototype with matching grants, challenge funds and innovation vouchers; here, companies are told to borrow at commercial rates, while, government takes proactive approaches revising and increasing pay scale to facilitategovernment employees imposing extreme indirect tax burden on crores of marginal people nationwide-- ultimately, poses a question on national vision and priorities. In a high-interest environment, the rational choice is to delay and imitate. Fourth, regulation often arrives late and heavy, informal solutions scale first and then face bans. That cycle wastes learning, destroys capital and turns founders into non-compliant operators rather than vendors to the state.

The GII scoreboard is a diagnosis, not a destiny. Resilience is more than lastingshocks; it is learning faster than the shock cycle. Innovation is more than invention; it is turning scattered solutions into advantage. We have volunteers running drills on the coast, an EV rickshaw ecosystem in cities, a perennial rice line at IUBAT, and homegrown techs that cut steam, save water and power. A country that already does these things can build systems that move ingenuity from town to townand from local pilots to global markets.

The writer is a Trade and Development Economist, Chief Research Officer (CRO) of Bangladesh Textile Today & Co-Founder of Nexadev