Bernard Lunn has a detailed article on the state of innovation in India. He notices that there has been progress in a lot of areas like reliable low cost telecommunications, but the killer app is still missing. There are many Indian entrepreneurs, but not many of them are in India. Which probably hints towards lack of resources and the society not encouraging entrepreneurship, though this is changing slowly.
Before continuing on a similar line, let me list some efforts, excluding the many clones of social networking sites, that are coming out of young India Inc.
- ion
- Guruji
- MapmyIndia
- Innovatively developed WiFi mesh
- Warana experimenting with wired and wireless
- SMS Gupshup (my thoughts here and here)
- Indian Railway goes mobile
- New approaches for Web access
- Live Documents (my thoughts)
All of these might not be innovations, but they sure are innovative uses. And I am sure I have not listed all. But unfortunately, none of these are associated with big businesses or figure in the big talks. India Inc is still keen on services, but even there we are not seeing out of box thinking. I think there is a lot of innovation happening in the fields, and it is sure to increase as resources are now more accessible, but it is either not visible to the businesses or they are ignoring it.
Mobiles are seeing exceptional growth, wireless is being experimented with and some efforts are happening at the university level too. The future will definitely bring business from innovation, we have to see if it is initiated by Indian companies or the others.
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Abhijit, I work at SMSGupShup and it was heartening to see your post.
I agree with you in that there are a lot of innovative use cases which these products could service - but in order to service those cases, innovation is a necessary requirement of the products. We have released a bunch of new features in the recent past - the latest was enabling picture messaging and P2P messaging over SMS, using the mobile and web (covered @ - http://www.pluggd.in/2007/12/smsgupshup-send-picture-messageand-11-smses)
And with respect to visibility, that will happen in good time. First the value that these products and services provide have to be apparent to the users - it is becoming clearer to some users (this blog is evidence of that) and will only grow.
Also, folks like you can help a lot in the discovery and visibility process by means of these posts.