Process innovations: How different processes are managed within a firm to increase the firm’s competitiveness.

And Input innovations, related to inputs that are brought into a firm, such as talent, capital and technology.

The majority of the innovations recognised are in the product category — and highlight the very wide spectrum of players involved, from a large multinational such as Texas Instruments to wholly Indian companies, for instance, Mistral, to academia-fuelled start-ups such as Mango.

The Bangalore-based Comat Technologies has created rural business centres that address a key challenge: how to make a viable business out of it and how to scale up. Mango Technologies was born out of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore and has quickly become a respected supplier of solutions for mobile handsets, personal media players and the burgeoning area of Linux-fuelled personal devices.

Mistral’s proudly displayed ‘designed by Indians’ blurb has been featured on a wide range of digital signal processing and embedded system products.

The Nasscom Award singles out Mistral’s development of a military-standard developer board which, for the first time, combines general-purposes PowerPC chips with more application-specific DSPs.

Rajeev Ramachandra, COO of Mistral Solutions Pvt Ltd, says, “Innovation plays a key role in our design process and this recognition not only highlights Mistral’s constant endeavour to deliver industry-leading technologies in the embedded domain but also reinforces our vision of being a leading, product-realisation company for end-to-end embedded solutions.”

In keeping with its mandate to concentrate on societal challenges, Media Lab Asia has delivered a multi-lingual (English, Hindi, Bengali and Mizo) communication system for the speech-challenged that uses icons and pre-stored messages to bridge the gap for children affected with cerebral palsy (there are 23 lakh in India). It can be manufactured at a fraction of the cost of comparable imported systems.

The Bangalore development centre of Texas Instruments played a key role in helping TI deliver ‘LoCosto’, a system-on-a-chip that helped drive down the entry-level cost of a mobile handset to around Rs 1,200-1,500. Other companies, such as Motorola, Infineon and Philips, also put together their low- cost single-chip solutions — in a sense the award is a salute to all Indians who helped change the global dynamics of the mobile phone by making it something most people could afford.

The Wipro executives who left to form MindTree shared a quirky desire to crerate a new kind of IT company — one that made innovation and knowledge management a core tenet. The result is an entity that broke the mould for the way creative engineering is done in this country…. And Nasscom has recognised this contribution to the entire community.

In its own way, MeritTrac is a name employers turn to when they want to find nothing but the best of talent. The MeritTrac Assessment Zone is their one-stop solution.

Nasscom is not alone in nurturing Indian innovation. In October last, Microsoft hosted a two-day ‘India is Innovation’ summit to motivate fresh talent to consider partnering with its research group in Bangalore as well as the larger Indian Development Centre in Hyderabad.

And earlier this year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) joined hands with Kickstart, an association of entrepreneurs, to host ‘Headstart and Compute 2008’ — a unique coming together of the entire ecosystem for creativity: ‘ideas’ people, designers, venture capitalists, manufacturers.’ The organisers chose some 20 companies and products with potential and provided them a platform to talk with potential developers.

The products included 90 Degree Internet, an innovative travel portal that enabled users to plan a journey combining rail, air and road journeys; SneakCast, a video search engine; Sonim Technologies, a provider of ruggedised handsets and Internet Telephony applications; TringMe, a completely FLASH-based phone client; iWave, a maker of embedded hardware and hand-held terminal solutions… as well as relative biggies such as Infosys, Pramati, ThoughtWorks and Symantec. (Fuller briefs on all the innovations can be found at http://www.headstart.in )

How many of these ideas will become tomorrow’s ‘killer applications’ fuelling a wave of products or processes that the world was waiting for? Who knows? But showcases like these are proof that the stuff of greatness is there in Indian innovation, waiting in the wings for customer wishlist and entrepreneurial savvy to come together in a grand techno-manthan or churning.

Market facing innovation

Comat Technologies: Rural Business Centres, which serve over 35,000 rural customers a day.

Financial Technologies India Ltd, Distributed Order Matching Engine), an integrated matching engine for commodities as well as equities providing Trading, Surveillance, real-time pre trade Risk Management and Clearing and Settlement.

Mango Technologies: Application framework for low-cost terminal devices such as mobile phones, media players, etc.

MediaLab Asia- for Sanyog, a multilingual augmentative communication system for the speech Impaired and children affected with Neuro Motor Disorders such as Cerebral Palsy.

Mistral Solutions: for V8TS, a dual sub-system product consisting of digital signal processing and control processing on a single platform.

Texas Instruments, for LoCosto, the first single chip solution for wireless handsets.

Process innovation

Mindtree Consulting- for Knowledge Management ecosystem, a holistic view of the entire lifecycle of knowledge: creation and innovation, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and reuse.

Input innovation

MeritTrac Solutions Pvt Ltd - for online assessment hubs to provide an ideal testing ambience with end-to-end recruitment processing, from registrations to the offer rollout.

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