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India is Innovation – Post 2

Microsoft demonstrated their Multipoint technology where two people can use one computer at the same time.






Craig Mundie: “5 Years back during my early trips to India, I saw it was primarily about People being shipped outside or rented out. We need a few people who are thinking outside the system. It is important to nurture these people. Capital availability, Intellectual nurturing and Infrastructure are all needed to do innovation.If you look at the problems we have now whether it is basic literacy, healthcare, energy problem there is no other way other than to invent our way out. And IT has the ability to influence and help all forms of engineering. The task on hand that is an opportunity for India is the analogy to cellphones. Both India and China leapfrogged from copper fixedlines where they lagged developed countries to mobile phones penetration. I have been thinking about this for few years, as life has become more comfortable the country doesn’t celebrate their engineers, they are more driven by the media and sports. In India it seems to be Bollywood and Cricket. In USA you ask the kids you do you want to do be when you grow up they say Tiger woods/Britney spears and not Bill Gates. In China the same question gets answered as Bill Gates. You want to do things for the long term, for example what I do as Chief Research Officer sees light not less than 3 years”

Dr R A Mashelkar (Ex-Director General of CSIR): “India has 3 advantages – Democracy, Diversity, Demography. India has 3 freedom, in 1947 the first freedom political freedom; Second was with Liberalization has brought down the cost of capital and freedom to do things in 1991; The third is technology freedom in 2007 with Nuclear deal. India also has been uneven innovator as only 3% work in organized Private sector/97% work for unorganized sector and India is a hesitant innovator especially because we are reluctant to face IP rights, etc. The big challenge for India is including those that are excluded those at the bottom of pyramid. IT among other things, especially when you have to deal with large number of people and huge distance. Solutions like TCS illiterate learning program that can make them read in 6 weeks and they have demonstrated that successfully in South Africa as well. Innovator sees what everyone sees but thinks what no one is thinking. Innovator doesn’t know that it cannot be done. When you want to achieve something that was not achieved before you got to use methods that has been not used before. Engineering of the word Engineer will be done by Engineers themselves. I am delighted to be an engineer”

India Is Innovation (i3network.in)

India Is Innovation (i3network) I am in Microsoft India’s i3 2007 event in Leela, Bangalore. Many eminent speakers are talking today about how India is innovating.


Mr.Ravi Venkatesan talked about “How a World Bank report that says India’s GDP can become 5 times of what it is today. As a country we have learned to innovate around constraints. Look in the Mobile phone industry where we have the lowest ARPU but still some of the highest urban teledensity. Take say Tata ACE or other innovative products built on Shoe string budgets when compared with rest of the world. Take for instance a gentleman from Chennai is able to produce solar power heated water. The challenge is to accelerate these sparse and spread innovations. Only 16% of Manufacturing industry in India have forward planning for human resources, in China it is 92%. We have done a bad job of applying IT within the country. Investments in IT in India is only 3.5% GDP same as Bangladesh & Sri Lanka. Today we are talking about Innovation from India, Innovation for India, Innovation with India. India has over 8 Million SMEs and they are the primary employment drivers and only 2 Million of them use computers other than Mobile. In Tirupur we have a model for Software plus Service model for garment industry by paying Rs.5000/2500 per user. Our DPE team is going to work with Startups in enabling them with technology, opening doors, connecting to venture capitalists


Ramgopal Subramaniam from Aztecsoft did the demo of their Tirupur Garment cluster for SME.


Prof.Sadagopan talked about “I will talk about Innovation East of Bangalore, West of Bangalore and lastly in Bangalore.



  1. For example nearly a decade back In Tirupathi, we developed a system where by each pilgrim got a barcode tag which replaced physical queue with a logical queue. It costs 10paise and over 26 Million people have used it so far. Later we found that the pilgrims took bath in the template tank, so we moved to water proof tag. Now we have extended the system to Internet. Initially critics said illiterates will oppose it, but they support it b’cos they don’t have the bribing opportunities that literates have:-). To make it India it got to be Absolutely low cost, reliable  and easy to use.
  2. Moving West, in Udipi we have a company called Robosoft serving Marquee Top 5 Japan companies for Device driving with over 2000 people and he calls his place Silicon Beach, this proves innovation can happen anywhere
  3. In Bangalore – From JP Nagar few years a 30 people company managed to make USD 6 Million for a gadget that unwired iPod. They are closed now, but the point that innovation can happen from anywhere.

Most of the innovation can happen from most unusual place. So India innovating should be India innovating from anywhere in the country.


There is a social dilemma, because in India everyone wants to be developing software, but the bigger opportunity/large number of jobs are in maintenance of software/business. The message should somehow reach the youngsters and that Maintenance is cool. Even in Microsoft, people will like to first go to MS Research, then to MS Labs finally to Sales or Support. But most of the challenging work happens in Support.


Automotive and Retail are the next booming industry and both are IT intensive


Srikanth Rao of Affordable Business Solutions says the “biggest gap of man power exists for SME players. They can’t train people because if they train the trained resources will quit. If you can do a solution at less than 10% of the overall cost to company and produce 20 to 30% cost saving, you got it”