By M H Ahssan
In 499 AD, Aryabhatta, a 23-year-old mathematician-astronomer from Pataliputra , shook the world by introducing the concept of zero. Still, it took
a million mutinies and over 1,500 years for the rest of the world to converge to India, to seek out innovations which would serve the world at large. To tap the inventive bent of the Indian mind. To realise the potential of a civilisation that cannot be taken for granted. To start all over again... from ground zero.
Ridden by the looming economic crisis with its uncertain trough and faced with the overheated economies of the West, multinationals are now driving their look-East policy. What started off with MNCs in dire straits simply fishing around for low-cost alternatives to existing problems eventually had them stumbling upon novel ideas in India with global implications.
And so, for the first time ever, ideas are being spawned and prototypes developed in India to cater to the rest of the world. It’s a brave new approach that bears testament to the ingenuity of the Indian mind. As CD embarks on the road to discovery, it comes across technical and non-tech multinationals making hay with the Made-In-India tag.
As the burgeoning population of the subcontinent makes room for innovations with mass appeal, costs need to be pared and technology aligned to go global.
“India has this advantage of dealing with the more-for-less-for-more paradigm , and nowadays, that’s the mantra driving innovations worldwide,” contends Porus Munshi , author of the book Making Breakthrough Innovation Happen—How 11 Indians Pulled Off the Impossible.
“Most of the future customers are going to come from India and China and MNCs would rather innovate from here and take it to the West,” he adds. Interestingly, it’s not just the bottom of the pyramid innovations that are attracting MNC attention but also those aimed at the more urbane middle segment across the world.
Take the case of automaker Maruti Suzuki. For the first time since the 28 years of its inception , it developed a concept car with the AStar last year.
While 33 year-old Saurabh Singh has done the exterior job, Rajesh Gogu, 30, worked on the car’s interiors. “We wanted to showcase a concept car and bring some characteristics of India on to the vehicle—so the headlamp shape and the front of the car were inspired by Indian motifs,” says CV Raman , General Manager-R&D , Maruti Suzuki.
It took about a year from January 2007 when it was conceived, to develop the concept car. Today, it is sold all across Western Europe and is raring to go to Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. “The A-Star is the first of its kind in India to be taken global ,” adds a company spokesperson.
From cars to engines: Bosch India’s Common Rail Injection System (CRS) using Single Cylinder Pump for diesel engines, is taking the world by storm.
“There are quite a lot of engines in the market that have been upgraded to the next emission level, for which a common rail injection system is a musthave . The commercially available common rail pumps cannot be fitted into small engines . But technically, these pumps are required to fit into the engines to meet higher emission norms. Our CRS does just that,” explains R Baskaran, DGM, Product Development at Bosch India, who cracked the CRS code with less than 10 engineers in 2005. Today, the revolutionary engines are in use in Europe and South East Asia.
Meanwhile, global network management behemoth Cisco Systems, is busy integrating cities from its globalisation centre in Bangalore .
“In February, we launched one of the most important initiatives in Cisco called Smart Connected Communities with five main sub-verticals—Transportation , Energy, Buildings, Security and Citizen Services (Healthcare, Education, etc). We sensed how cities must work and what needs to be done to make them work. Essentially, we are linking digital and physical infrastructure in order to IT-enable the city,” elaborates Syed Hora, Chief of Staff at the Cisco Globalisation Centre.
A “few hundred” scientists are already at work providing technology for building several economic cities in Saudi Arabia. Besides, the team is also working with several developers in Dubai to create smart shopping malls and a futuristic city in Incheon near Seoul, where a smart, connected community is gradually coming to life.
At the US-based diversified technology and manufacturing leader Honeywell, addressing security breaches became critical. That’s when Harsha Angeri, Director–Strategy and Initiatives of the Bangalore-based Honeywell Technology Solutions, set up his honey trap with the homegrown security convergence middleware solution.
“Violations in both physical & logical security domains are quite common. Today’s access control systems & IT security systems find it tough to cope with such challenges as they are not coordinated. So we developed a security convergence middleware solution that connects these systems,” says Angeri. Given the potential for the solution globally, the product is now being offered across the world by the parent. The Bangalore centre has already filed three patents to protect and differentiate the solution.
Again, in the Bangalore-based HP Labs, about 10 engineers burnt the midnight oil for eight months in 2006 along with Dr Shekhar Ramachandra Borgaonkar, head of Affordable Access Group, HP Labs, to come up with the Gesture Keyboard—a writing tablet that enables people to write on a touch-sensitive surface in Indic languages. Now, it is easy to create such a thing in English since the language has only 26 alphabets . But each of the Indic languages has 1,500 unique codes, whereas English has only 128 of them.
“We stuck the standard template of alphabets on to the writing tablet—the innovation was to write the vowel modifiers on the consonants,” explains Borgaonkar, whose innovation bagged the Wall Street Journal and Nasscom awards in the consumer products category. Though the intellectual property of the Gesture Keyboard belongs to HP, the company is yet to market it, even though its partner, the Bangalore-based Prodigy Labs, has sold 2,000-odd pieces in Hindi and Marathi. Indic languages have a far greater appeal than the existing Indian languages, as it covers Thai, Indonesian, Sinhalese and other South East Asian languages too.
“For HP Labs, the time to market is usually 3-5 years. It’s taking long for Gesture Keyboard because 90% customers of PCs still use English . I’m not aware of a local language database but we’d be very happy to supply the Gesture Keyboard if there’s demand,” claims Neelam Dhawan, MD, HP India.
The mood at Microsoft India Development Centre (MSIDC) is upbeat as well. The Bangalore-based team is now working on the first release of Velocity, an explicit distributed in-memory cache that enables building highly scalable applications by caching data closer to the application tier. This application cache fuses memory across machines into a unified cache.
“There is tremendous interest in the community and customer base for this technology,” says Srini Koppolu, Corporate VP & MD, MSIDC. Again, at Microsoft Research & Development Centre (MSRDC), headed by Dr P Ananadan, multipoint is making waves. A boon to rural education, multipoint makes use of multiple mice connected to the USB port with the help of an adaptor. “We shared the concept with one of the product development teams and they created what has come to be known as the ‘Software Development Kit’ .
This was made available to the Unlimited Potential Group within Microsoft , which is now evangelising multipoint by taking it to other parts of the world,” says Anandan. Also, the Windows Live Local group has taken up Robust Location Search wholly devised by MSRDC.
The technology makes use of fuzzy indexing to search for all landmarks on maps requested by the user. Standard search engines cannot pinpoint addresses as names are often in local languages . However, owing to fuzzy indexing, it approximately matches with the addresses in the database.
And IBM is already celebrating with its Spoken Web, developed by the IBM India Research Lab, with the potential of bringing the power of the Internet to the masses through telephones. The basic principle of Spoken Web lies in creating a system analogous to the World Wide Web using a technology most of us have in commonspeech . Spoken Web helps people create voice sites using a simple telephone—mobile or landline.
“Spoken Web is compelling for people who don’t have access to the Internet , or have little or no education. In growth markets, where penetration of mobile is miles ahead of that of the Internet, the Spoken Web has the potential to bring a revolution to the way people interact, exchange information or even do business. The technology can be a key catalyst in bridging the digital divide,” says Dr Guruduth Banavar, Director–IBM India Research Lab and Chief Technologist–IBM India /South Asia.
Chipmaker Intel too has attempted to bridge the digital divide in its Bangalorebased platform definition center with the Classmate PC. Conceived in 2005 and brought to market a year later, the techies used their prowess to cut down the size of the laptop and yet retain all its features.
“After extensive ethnographic research in the education domain, we came up with this innovation in the education space, which later created a whole new genre of products called Netbooks,” says Ajit Singh, Director-Emerging Market Platform Group, Intel, and one of the six members of the Classmate PC innovation team.
At the Finnish handphone giant Nokia, the bubbly will pop in a weeks’ time when it unleashes the 100% homegrown Nokia Life Tools, geared toward a non-urban consumer in emerging markets. “We realised that people in small towns have a much larger expectation from the mobile phone, such as how to speak better English or how to prepare for a better tomorrow.
These insights helped us to provide a holistic picture and build applications, such as learn-one-worda-day , with pronunciation and vernacular equivalents,” explains Jawahar Kanjilal, Head-Emerging Market Services, Nokia Corp. Nokia is now looking at South East Asia, Africa and Latin America for replication . A 15-member team worked on the Nokia Life Tools with the brainwave being provided by Kanjilal in the first half of 2008.
Even the FMCG segment is fast using India as its experimental turf before taking ideas global. HUL’s Pureit water purifiers, which run with a GermKill Battery Kit that kills and removes impurities to give safe drinking water, are an indigenous innovation . ”Pureit is a combination of unique purification technologies. It took over five years to develop this breakthrough product proposition.” Says Dr. Nikhilesh Mukherjee, Resource and Programme Director , Water, Hindustan Unilever Limited.
Clearly, the arc lights across India’s innumerable MNC labs are fuelling global innovations as players from IT, telecom, auto, FMCG and more are looking at domestic talent in the pursuit of ‘wow’ . Circa 2009, Aryabhatta would be pleasantly surprised to find a pioneering country in motion, beyond the zero hour.
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