Grasroot Level Innovations: An untapped Opprtunity

Posted by: Aswathi Muralidharan in in the news on Sep 22, 2009  

During TieCon Delhi 2009 Conference, held at Taj Palace in New Delhi, I had once again the opportunity to meet Professor Anil Gupta once again.  This was the second time I was meeting him. He was a panelist at one of the discussions at the conference on grassroot level innovations in India. As usual, he was all pepped up and lively dressed up in a kurta pyjama, unlike the other speakers. And as expected he surprised the audience by showing a very remarkable innovation!

The innovation was a laptop, made by an Indian doctor, which had two screens one at the front and one at the back! During presentations, especially informal ones consisting of three or more people, one often had to face the discomfort of peeping onto the presentation presenters’ screen to get a clue of what was going on. Now, with this simple innovation the presenter could view his presentation from his side and the others from the other screen without any discomfort. If you thought such innovations would have had ready takers, then you are probably wrong, because the innovator had to run pillar to post with the innovation to get it to the market. Finally help came but from a foreign based company, which agreed to manufacture the laptop with a promise not to do reverse engineering of the product


In India, there are several such remarkable innovations that could as well be the game changers for some industries. However, the problem with them is that there are often no takers. Lack of awareness of these products is another problem, and so is their inability to reach markets as they have not been proven yet. Now, this trend is slowly witnessing a change thanks to the efforts of some incubation centers that are working towards increasing the business potential of such grass root level innovations. If entrepreneurship is all about  risk taking, then I think this is a risk worth taking!

 

Comments (1)Add Comment
...
written by sudarshana, September 26, 2009
Now a days it has became fashion to talk about grassroots inventions.But in practice no one bother about grassroots inventions or inventor.I am talking out of my bitter experience.I am a grassroots inventor with dozens of ideas.I got 1st prize for an idea about shrinking the KEYBOARD in a competition conducted by the National Innovation Foundation in 2001.For the last seven years I am struggling to get some help.I approached almost all the government and private agencies.But no one bothered.
Main problem is, these stalwarts don't understand the problems faced by the grass rooters.They put forward some forms and ask to fill them.These forms are very academic and contains so many clauses which are absolute Latin to poor grass rooter.They give more importance to form filling than the invention.Grassroots inventor runs to pillar to post and in the process louses all the money he had and at the end gets dejected,looses sleep,grows beard and becomes a laughing stock in his village.
If there is any one who is really want to help grass roots inventors,please contect me.Sudarshanaa@gmail.com
report abuse
vote down
vote up
Votes: +0

Write comment
smaller | bigger

security code
Write the displayed characters


busy

[ Back ]