NEWS

Indian entrepreneurs winning global awards for breakthrough innovations
March 27, 2009, The Economic Times

On February 17, Santosh Ostwal, the son of a farmer, took to the stage at Nokia's 'Call Innovators Challenge' in Barcelona. He was showcasing his Nano Ganesh, a modem, which coupled with a mobile phone, is connected to the starter mechanism of the ubiquitous water pump, making the long march of the farmers to their water pumps in remote locations unnecessary.

At first, the 42-year-old , whose current turnover stands at a modest Rs 2 crore, got cold feet before a global audience . There were 1,000 competitors from the world over, but while the footage of his invention was playing, video director Doug Wallen had something to say: "An Indian man has made this? Amazing!" The phrase still rings in Ostwal's ears. "It gave me a lot of pleasure and helped build my confidence enormously," says Ostwal, who amid standing ovation, bagged the first prize at the awards night. "I'm now going in for a Rs 100-crore investment, and expect revenues worth Rs 350 crore this fiscal."

It's not just handmade paper and ethnic ballpoints that are earning India's innovator-entrepreneurs accolades abroad. Some of the largest and most recognised multinationals are looking at hitherto unknown talent from the subcontinent, and taking them global. "India has traditionally been strong at process or business model innovation, but now we see a lot more coming forward from the product innovation side," says Porus Munshi, partner consultant at Erehwon Consulting.

Suddenly, the landscape seems to be changing as dozens of homegrown incubators across the country's many technology institutes are churning out international talent. Tech schools across the country are waking up from Fabian fatalism to can-do optimism. "Earlier , more companies from India were doing product innovation but now, individuals are coming to the fore," says Munshi.

"The convergence of the mobile and internet, the emergence of the Indian mobile sector as the world's second largest market and the increased focus on emerging markets for future growth are all creating opportunities for these developers to deliver innovation and shape the future of the mobile sector," says Kenny Mathers, Head of Developer Relations Forum Nokia-APAC. In the 'emerging markets' category, the Nano Ganesh application from India won the grand prize, and in the 'eco challenge' category, another Indian Green Phone application was the runner up.

At 29, the Hyderabad-based Kranthi Vistakula dreams big. He can afford to, after being in the top five of the Intel-Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge last year. "The exposure helped me enormously and whenever we approach investors nowadays, they know the kind of due diligence that has gone into my technology," says the CEO of Dhama Apparels, a company that makes air-conditioned jackets, helmets and neck scarves using its patented 'ClimaCon' technology . The Government of India has pumped in Rs 45 lakh into his company , as he enters the final stages of negotiations with five potential investors from abroad.

In the same competition, G Rajmohan, a PhD student of National Institute of Immunology (NII), along with his fellow student CK Anish, stole a march over Vistakula, bagging the second prize. The innovation - an artificial skin for burn treatment. "We wanted to develop a low-cost alternative for the treatment, something that could be used successfully in the rural milieu also," says Rajmohan, with an eye now to set up his own company that will focus on targeted drug delivery in cancer.

Berkeley is the perfect setting for any marriage between business and technology. The university, over the years, has spawned some amazing talent, among them Andrew Grove (co-founder, Intel) and Dean Witter (co-founder, Morgan Stanley). "We are proud that Rajmohan and Anish were awarded second place for their wound-treating membrane technology. It is inspiring to see the approaches that entrepreneurship teams took to solve worldwide challenges," says Dr. Praveen Vishakantaiah, President, Intel India. "Intel believes a strong education drives innovation that fuels our economy, and this is strong evidence that higher education has a major role to play in expanding possibilities."

Janak Seth, who runs Century Pharmaceuticals in Vadodara is also on medicine's recognition row. A few years back, he designed a molecule that forces cancerous and asthmatic cells to commit suicide. That won Seth the Lockheed Martin gold medal and paved the way for discussions with a couple of American companies. "This is a completely new molecule with no parallel in the world," says Seth.

In Bangalore, Devesh Agarwal, CEO of Infomart India, has a technology called 'Power over Ethernet' (PoE), a system which transmits electrical power, along with data, to remote devices over cable in an Ethernet network. The company's annual revenues currently stand at $0.5 million, all of which comes from offshore. Infomart is credited with developing the world's first high-power PoE endpoint solution to address the emerging high power needs of video surveillance and wireless access points, where it would otherwise be inconvenient and expensive to supply power.

A Lockheed Martin awardee, Agarwal was pleasantly surprised in 2007 when "one of the largest companies in the PoE space came to us and wanted to buy the product to add to their brand portfolio." Agarwal plunged headlong into the offer. "The quality norms and processes that the company insisted on increased our understanding manifold For instance, when we saw their packaging, we felt it was marginally more expensive but there was zero transit damage and the product reached the customer more attractively," he says. He switched to similar packaging for his own brand "because the last step in manufacturing (packaging) is the first step in buying."

Recently, Gopi Kumar Bulusu, CEO of the Chennai-based Sankhya Technologies, was overjoyed when he received an email from Gary Smith, a former Gartner man who now runs a consultancy and comes up with 'Wall Charts' , the Bible for picking systems design solutions the world over. The mail stated that Smith planned to put Bulusu's technology on his chart for circa 2009. After all, the 39-year-old has designed a product called Teraptor that allows the design of new embedded systems devices at an architectural level, reducing the workforce on embedded design and bringing down the time to market. "Once the Wall Chart is up, we would be established across the embedded systems community worldwide ," says Bulusu, whose $0.5 million company has just started getting some traction from the Technology Development Board.