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 »

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Antrix, a division of ISRO, is a outsourced satellite launch provider with costs 30% cheaper compared to those of US and Russian providers. Outsourcing beyond IT! Wired magazine did a feature article on India’s space program a couple of years ago.

livemint.com

The Indian Space Research Organisation, or ISRO, plans to launch its lunar mission in October, marking the start of a two-year quest to learn more about the evolution of the moon and map its surface for minerals such as helium-3, or He-3.

Isro will launch Chandrayaan-1, the unmanned spacecraft, between 19 and 26 October, officials at the space agency said on Thursday.
The spacecraft, which weighs 590kg, will be fitted with 11 scientific instruments, including five from the US, Sweden, Japan, Germany and Bulgaria. These instruments and cameras would look for water on the moon, besides mapping the chemical, soil and mineral characteristics of its surface.
The Indian mission will also be the first to map the entire surface of the moon, including the polar regions where frozen water could be found, said T.K. Alex, director of Isro’s satellite centre in Bangalore, at a press conference.
Scientists estimate the moon has large reserves of He-3, a mineral used to produce nuclear energy that has the potential to solve the world’s energy problems.

Chandrayaan-1 will be fitted with an instrument provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, of the US to map the lunar surface. “The scientific knowledge gained by M3 will prove to be a valuable resource for Nasa’s future exploration of the moon,” Mary White, a member of the moon mineralogy mapper, or M3, team at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said by email.

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The Economic Times

The world’s largest chipmaker, Intel, on Tuesday unveiled its latest microprocessor for servers, designed entirely by its Bangalore team and developed in a record two years. The Intel R&D centre in Bangalore designed the Xeon 7400 series processor and it marked the first time that work on the 45 nanometre technology was taken up by the company outside its US home base. The six-core microprocessor is based on Intel’s x86 architecture.

A 300-member team from Bangalore undertook the work with support from units in the US and Costa Rica, Intel India president Praveen Vishakantaiah said.

Intel’s Bangalore R&D operations, which started a decade ago, have grown to become one of the largest centres outside the US. Besides the six-core microprocessor, the India R&D team has made important contributions to the teraflop and quad-core Xeon processor.

Mr Vishakantaiah described it as a validation of the Bangalore operations and termed the country as a strategic destination as Intel India continues its focus on high-end technology development.

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