India to dominate innovation space in next decade

NEW DELHI, INDIA: India, a service providing nation is now heading to become a technology innovating nation.

Jason Pontin, the charismatic editor and publisher of MIT's 'Technology Review', the publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is being launched in India by CyberMedia Group, confidently proclaims that India is going to dominate the innovation space.

This is why the 109-year-old magazine has launched an edition in the country. "I want to be the first to tell the world about the action in the labs here," says Pontin.

At times economists predict superpower status for India based on its growth figures and the economy's resilience in the face of global downturn. But the motor of this growth would be investments in science and technology.

EmTech2009, an emerging technologies conclave recently hosted in New Delhi by Technology Review and CyberMedia, forecasts that India's knowledge superpower domain is all set to extend beyond the field of IT.

The country would spearhead in areas namely healthcare, education, biomaterials and nano-technology.

The conclave provided glimpse of how technology that is developed by Indians is empowering and enabling millions .

Pontin talked about Technology Review's annual list of technologists, who could change the world, which is increasingly being dominated by Indians.

In 2004, there was Vikram Sheel Kumar, founder of Dimagi - a unique combination of engineering and medicine. Kumar is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and the Harvard Medical School. His software products have encouraged compliance from diabetic patients and removed stigma from HIV/AIDS testing.

This year, a computer science professor Vivek Pai's technological creation turned out a wonder. A technology that would help store web content to enable poor students in developing nations beat bad net connections.

The above examples shows that the nature of the technologies emerging from innovation labs around the world today is completely democratic, having the power to touch billions - the literate and the unlettered, the affluent as well as those at the bottom of the pyramid.

Companies in the IT, mobile and electronics space, are looking to expand their market to the next billion "non-premium" users, are tweaking the characteristics of the new technology so that it is in sync with the needs of their new target base.

In fact, today, it is the cross-play of technologies from different fields that is making a difference to the lives of many.

At a macro level, IT and mobile telephony are powering healthcare delivery as seen in the health superhighway envisaged by Apollo Hospital's Prathap Reddy.

And then at a micro level, advances in camera technology is helping doctors make an effective diagnosis as it helps improves CT scans to unimaginable levels.

"The new emerging technology is part of an ecosystem. It reduces information asymmetry. It makes time and geography irrelevant," says Vivek Mohan, president of Alcatel Lucent, a company whose mobile applications are transforming lives at the bottom of the pyramid.

Is India ready to accept this technological boon conferred on it?

The answer points a positive note -Yes. The answer is obviously found in the context of the experiences of companies like DuPont and mChek, which found rural India not just willing to accept but often two steps ahead!

As individuals are taking technology by its reins, configuring devices to suit their own unique needs, they are also setting new parameters for innovation.

In the words of Ramesh Raskar, a brilliant MIT computational photography whiz who is working on a next generation camera for the people by the people: "The emerging technology is distributed, adaptive, democratic".

Hordes of MIT researchers are also descending on the country to use it as their experimental field, and not just because of the scale, size, the lower cost and stratified society alone. Those are the old reasons. "India is an amazing test bed for us because it's so ready to experiment and adapt," says Raskar.

A country beholding its culture and legacy is now all set to turn into a new level of tech savvy nation.