A simple bowl of white rice sits on a conference table inside the Seattle headquarters of global-health nonprofit PATH. What looks and tastes like ordinary rice is actually the product of two decades of research and development.
For every 100 grains of rice, the bowl contains one grain of Ultra Rice. It’s actually not rice at all, but pasta fortified with vitamins and minerals and squeezed through a rice-shaped mold. The manufactured grains are made from a mixture of rice flour, nutrients and binding agents derived from seaweed.
Ultra Rice is now being produced and tested around the world as a potential solution to malnutrition. Governments in Brazil and India are serving it in school-lunch programs.
About 2.5 billion people consume rice as their main source of food. Many of them suffer from deficiencies of iron, folic acid, vitamin A and other essential nutrients.
Adding nutrients to rice can reach millions of people without asking them to change basic shopping, cooking or eating habits, says Dipika Matthias, who directs the Ultra Rice project at PATH in Seattle. The challenge: making pasta that smells, tastes and looks like rice, but packs a powerful combination of calcium, zinc, folic acid, thiamin and iron inside, can withstand heat and humidity in storage, and doesn’t wash away or break down when cooked.
This kind of innovation can serve all Bottom of the Pyramid markets. In Latin America about 25% percent of the people (130 or so million) live on less than $2 a day.
WSJ.com
India’s many engineers, whose best-known role is to help Western companies expand or cut costs, are now turning their attention to the purchasing potential of the nation’s own 1.1-billion population.The trend that surfaced when Tata Motors’ tiny $2,200 car, the Nano, hit Indian roads in July, has resulted in a slew of new products for people with little money who aspire to a taste of a better life. Many products aren’t just cheaper versions of well-established models available in the West but have taken design and manufacturing assumptions honed in the developed world and turned them on their heads.
For the farmer who wants to save for the future, one Indian entrepreneur has developed what is, in effect, a $200 portable bank branch. For the village housewife, a wood-burning stove has been reinvented to make more heat and less smoke for $23. For the slum family struggling to get clean water, there is a $43 water-purification system. For the villager who wants to give his child a cold glass of milk, there is a tiny $70 refrigerator that can run on batteries. And for rural health clinics, whose patients can’t spend more than $5 on a visit, there are heart monitors and baby warmers redesigned to cost 10% of what they do elsewhere.
Such inventions represent a fundamental shift in the global order of innovation. Until recently, the West served rich consumers and then let its products and technology filter down to poorer countries. Now, with the developed world mired in a slump and the developing world still growing quickly, companies are focusing on how to innovate, and profit, by going straight to the bottom rung of the economic ladder. They are taking advantage of cheap research and development and low-cost manufacturing to innovate for a market that’s grown large enough and sophisticated enough to make it worthwhile.
GE’s chairman, Jeffrey Immelt, on a recent tour of Asia, outlined how the global giant is restructuring to take advantage of what he calls “reverse innovation.” While in India this month, he said the innovations in medical equipment [in India] could eventually help bring down the cost of health care in the U.S. Read the rest of this entry »
This is science-fiction brought to life.
3 News NZ
A group of Indian engineering students has invented a unique pollution free bike which runs on air pressure and does not emit carbon into the atmosphere.Where normal motorbikes use an engine powered by petrol, this runs on air.
The Air Bike, as it’s called, carries two large tanks of compressed air.“Our professors had asked us to create something which nobody has done so far and is also pollution free. Something which is economical and affordable to a common man. So we thought of inventing a bike, which runs on air. There is no combustion in this bike as it does not use any petrol, diesel or anything,” says Air Bike co-designer, Arshdeep Singh.
Technorati Tags: india, frugal engineering, innovation, renewables
Today, as the economic slowdown shrinks demand in mature markets, some of the world’s largest companies are drawing on inputs provided by their Indian talent and running critical functions from their Indian units. They are devising future strategy, creating blueprints for marketing campaigns, building brands and new businesses from India-based centres that are more tuned to the needs of customers in emerging markets.
Global businesses are also gaining from innovative products that are born out of insights provided by India’s domestic market. Web tools that hike the amount of money earned from Internet search, termed search monetization, developed by the India research centre of Yahoo Inc. , have helped boost the Internet company’s profits.
Iconic apparel maker Levi Strauss and Co. is set to launch a range of non-denim street wear in the US market, a sub-brand that was first developed for collegegoers in India. The launch of Levi’s Sykes, a range of non-denim street wear for 15- to 19-year-olds, marks the international debut of a product category built primarily in India.
——
“A vast majority of the five billion people in the world currently underserved by technology live in emerging countries, so growth for Microsoft or any other company across any industry will come from these geographies,” says Ravi Venkatesan, chairman, Microsoft India Pvt. Ltd. The Indian subsidiary is the only one where the software company’s six business units at present employ about 5,000 people, makes it the second largest employee base—next only to the US.
“Emerging markets have similar issues of affordability, accessibility and relevance. A lot of innovation happening in India will be useful in similar economies,” says Venkatesan.
Vivek Wadhwa writing in BusinessWeek
Indian outsourcing industry has entered a new era of growth. Infosys (INFY), Satyam (SAY), HCL, and other IT outsourcing majors that once specialized in lower-value tasks such as application maintenance and business process outsourcing are seeing increasing success in providing outsourced high-value tasks such as total IT outsourcing, R&D, and business transformation services.Here are six reasons why this is true.
1. Faced with high turnover, rising salaries, and a weak public education system, top Indian companies started investing heavily in workforce education and development.
2. Attrition rates have been remarkably low and are dropping.
3. Rising salaries in Indian IT shops are no longer a problem.
4. Faced with brutal cost-control pressures caused by the global economic downturn, many companies are more desperate to outsource than ever before.
5. There has always been a trickle of highly skilled [Indian] workers returning from the U.S. and Europe to their home countries for family reasons and because they felt homesick.
6. India has been dramatically increasing the output of its engineering colleges, and now quality is improving.
Technorati Tags: india, outsourcing, high-end, R&D
Two Indian enterprises have won top prizes at this year’s prestigious Ashden Awards for sustainable energy, popularly known as the ‘Green Oscars’.
A Kerala-based company BIOTECH, involved in tackling the problem of dumped food waste, won the Ashden award carrying a monetary prize of 30,000 pounds while a Karnataka firm SELCO Solar Light Private Limited bagged the new Ashden Outstanding Achievement Award. Besides, SKG Sangha, a non-profit organisation based in Karnataka (supplies rural families with both dung based biogas plants for cooking and a
specially designed unit that turns the slurry from the biogas plant
into high quality fertiliser),received the second prize of 10,000 pounds.
BIOTECH was selected for tackling the problem of dumping of food waste in the streets of Kerala through installation of biogas plants that use the waste to produce gas for cooking and, in some cases, electricity for lighting.
To date BIOTECH has built and installed an impressive 12,000 domestic plants, 160 of which also use human waste from latrines(toilets) to avoid contamination of ground water, 220 institutional plants and 17 municipal plants that use waste from markets to power generations.
SELCO Solar Light Private limited had won the Ashden Award in 2005 and this year it won the new Ashden Outstanding Achievement Award in recognition of the remarkable progress it made during the last two years.
H Harish Hande, Managing Director of SELCO said since 2005, his company had increased total sales of solar systems from 48,000 to 71,000 despite nearly a 50 per cent increase in the price of small photo-voltaic modules on the world market.
“We have 25 service centres but we have a long way to go,” he said adding that if Government and financial institutions allocated enough funds for the programme it would help spread Solar Service for low-income households a great deal.
Technorati Tags: renewables, sustainability, solar, biogas
Even here in Mexico, in this vibrant wheat belt crisscrossed by tractors and crop dusters, farmers are in a daily struggle. Climate change is blamed for more frequent droughts, hotter temperatures and the spread of new plant diseases. The cost of fertilizers has tripled, and their overuse has depleted soils, spewed more greenhouse gas into the skies and polluted water with farm runoff.“It was a clearer agenda when Dr. Borlaug was here: The goal was to produce more food, period,” said Tom Payne of the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center. “Now our agenda has kind of brought in a lot of different facets that make it a lot more difficult.”
Matthew Reynolds, a wheat physiologist at the center, said the next green revolution needs to mix tried-and-true technologies with sustainable practices, or the world will be fighting famine again in another 50 years.
“We applied the Industrial Revolution model to the green agricultural revolution and we went a little bit too far in that direction, and now we have to back off a bit and respect the fact that the plants and the soil are biological,” he said. “They are not engineering problems. They’re more complex.”
Research and Development offshoring to India by international IT players, a $9.35 billion industry, is estimated to touch $21.4 billion by 2012.Mr Pari Natarajan, Chief Executive Officer, Zinnov Management Consulting, said that currently there are 594 R&D centres in India operating in SPD (software product development), embedded services and engineering services.
Bangalore, Pune and NCR together account for the majority of the R&D set-ups, with about 494 centres operating in these three cities.
He said that R&D offshoring in India currently employed about 1.4 crore (14 million) professionals across domains.
Technorati Tags: R&D
Hollywood is all set to use Indian technology for the first time. An erstwhile incubatee at the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), has been approached by prominent Hollywood production houses for his patented technology, which finds its application in the current film technology and also for Digital Intermediate Technology of the future.Ujwal Nirgudkar, who recently started his own company, Alpha Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, has developed a unique concept of ‘Online Sensitometric Quality Control’ for motion picture film processing. His innovative technology will bring down the cost of quality control and will be quite helpful to cinematographers, film laboratories, producers and scanner manufacturers across the world.
“I am in talks with some Hollywood post-production companies and one European company to license my patented product. As this new technology will help save cost and time for quality control of motion picture film processing, it has the potential to become the industry standard and has created a lot of interest in Hollywood,” says Ujwal Nirgudkar.
The existing concept in the industry uses separate film strips for controlling the quality of film processing. The old concept is offline and difficult to computerise. “This new technology changes the current offline quality control using sensitometric strips to a new online control system, which will have the sensitometric strip between the perforations of the picture film, which is an area not explored so far,” added Nirgudkar.
Technorati Tags: film
During a period of 25 years (1970-1996), a unique program, popularly known as Operation Flood, transformed a chronically milk-deficient India into the largest producer of milk and milk products in the world.Can this phenomenal turnaround-which has since become the stuff of legend-happen elsewhere? When can the experience in one country be replicated in another?
Under a new multi-donor trust fund, practitioners from the small town of Anand in the state of Gujarat are visiting Tanzania and Uganda to demonstrate first-hand how to replicate India’s “white revolution.”
This innovative exchange of practical experience is being funded through the South-South Experience Exchange Facility, officially launched by World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick during the World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings.
“In their quest to accelerate growth and improve living standards, policy makers in the developing world are constantly in search of innovative ideas. They see the experiences of their counterparts in emerging economies as increasingly relevant,” says Zoellick.
Technorati Tags: south-south cooperation
