Innovation: Local or Western?

In a recent debate, Peter Thiel, well known technology Venture Capitalist, made a comment that India and China need not innovate anything, rather they need to just look at what is successful in the West and copy that. A good write-up on why this approach is wrong is written by YourStory

And today, Hindustan Times has written about Prof Anil Gupta, who had moderated the panel discussion on innovations at Emtech 2010 (in which I was a panelist) and his work on discovering and popularising Indian innovations. The list of some innovations that have made a huge impact on the ground, but are totally indigenous and popularized by Prof Gupta must be an eye opener for Peter Thiel. I think none of these could have been thought of in the West.

I believe that each region comes with it's own separate challenges. I have seen this happen before - the West looks at solving problems in an entirely different way from the way the East does. This is not to say that one of these methods are better, but only to say that each place has a different set of constraints, and for the best solution to the local problems to emerge, the solutions have to emerge from places where the local constraints are best known. For example, taking the case of Vortex ATMs, I think the greatest innovation is not the reduced cost of ATMs, but the fact that due to its lower power consumption, the back-up time is greatly multiplied. The optimized solution for power constraints emerged only because the solution emerged from India, which faces a lot of power problems.

Similarly, the solutions like the cycle powered washing machine could also only emerge from places where making regular washing machines are a problem - places facing a lot of power cuts.

Hats off to Prof Gupta for his tireless efforts in spreading these ideas and popularizing them. May the local inventors thrive.

Emtech India Conference 2010

I was a speaker at Emtech India Conference 2010, speaking about "Cash boxes for Rural India" as part of the Social Innovations session. The panel discussion was chaired by Prof Anil K Gupta of IIM Ahmedabad. 

Unfortunately I had to miss out on most of the discussions, needing to be back in Chennai very soon. Of the discussions that I could be part of, the talk by Dr Raskar (of MIT Labs) was very interesting, with the technologies that he demonstrated looking like straight out of a sci-fi movie. 

There was also a young asst. professor from IIT-B - Shashikanth Suryanarayanan fro Dept of Mechanical Engineering, giving a talk about decoupling decision making and actuation. He has a case study about an advanced 'power steering' also capable of independently steering the front wheels (like / \ or \ /). This talk was interesting from two angles - the innovative technology part, and more importantly, the feel good factor about having bright young talents as profs at IITs.

The other technology innovator I was impressed with was Kranthi Kiran Vistakula (founder of Dhama Apparel Innovations), who has made a light weight (600 g) 'air conditioned jacket' which uses hydrogen bonding (I couldnt understand how), powered by small batteries. The nearest competitor product weighs a few kilograms.

It was good to meet these innovators first hand. Suddenly it dawned on me that technology innovation in India is not merely about software alone and that these are capable of having a greater impact on Indian life than its software growth.

The talk given by me at Emtech (on 8th March) as well as launch of India's largest solar powered ATM roll-out by my company Vortex has been covered in DNA on its 14th March Bangalore edition.

On winning Srijan 2009 Technology award for Vortex

"If you are a technologist and if you wish to be taken seriously, you must wear jeans and t-shirts to such events", said a friend at the venue, pointing to the dress worn by a very young CTO of one of the companies competing for the same category award. And there I was, dressed formally to the teeth - tie, suit and all, and feeling nervous as this was the first time I was handling anything like this in an official sense. Every other contesting company had sent in their CXOs or Directors - would they take Vortex lightly for having sent in someone "junior"?

My conscience told me that the jury would not have any such prejudices, which I realized to be true once I started making my presentation. Twenty minutes for the presentation , ten minutes for Q & A, I was told. I took the extempore route, and blurred the lines between Q & A and the presentation.

Questions were mainly on scalability, growth potential, impact of other  competing/complimentary ICT, etc. Based on Gramateller's lower initial investment requirements and lower running costs the jury could be convinced that our ATMs were the best bet to address the need of 1 million ATMs (1 ATM per 1000 people) - whereas the current penetration is less than 5% of the need at 45,000 ATMs.

The presentation I had prepared had patriotic overtures playing up the fully indigenous aspect of Gramateller, about we Indians believing in ourselves and having the guts to take on a market dominated by two huge MNCs - turned out to be interesting to make to a jury having 2 out of 3 members from outside India!

The 24 hour wait for the results was the toughest part. As the main event drew to a close, I felt increasingly like a schoolboy awaiting exam results. From the moment we knew we won, I was in a daze - walking up to the dias and receiving the award from Vijay Mahajan  - all went by as a blur. "We are buying two of your ATMs, that's my award to you", quipped Vijay Mahajan.

Then I spoke two lines - a poor semblence of an "acceptance speech" - my first one in my life, coming at the most unexpected time!

(details of the award at http://vortexindia.co.in/blog/index.php/2009/12/vortex-wins-srijan-2009-technology-innovation-awards/ and http://websiteclient.com/clients/srijan2009/winners.php)