‘China and India, the two rising powers, have officially acknowledged the need for ‘inclusive development.’ The majority of the rural population in both countries has been unable to access or benefit from the opportunities available from recent unprecedented economic growth. In this research project two research teams, Chinese and Indian, probe how innovation capacities can be enabled and sustained for inclusive development. Innovation for inclusive development demands analysis of exclusion as empirically observed in specific spaces; in rural areas and employment avenues as well as in the research and policy spaces that generate and deliver the knowledge inputs for development. The project explores how the notion of development gets overwhelmingly biased against the rural - the so-called low-tech sectors like agriculture and rural industrial clusters, which provide livelihoods for over eighty percent of the rural population. Despite significant differences, are there similarities in the ways in which India and China can enable innovation for inclusive development? How do policy makers, scientists and other stakeholders in innovation systems perceive and enable changes for inclusive development?