EMTECH INDIA 2009 – My raw notes. My interest is in the BOP angle, so that’s what I dropped in for. Here are my major takeaways for BOP:

• BOP where does it fit in India’s future? - 4 classifications. better faster cheaper - bpo. Localizations of global business model - amazon. India’s growth story – hotels, airport. Disruptive innovation – most exciting and BOP is here. (I am missing this in my four sub-economies analysis of China)

• Big ifs for India’s future – primary education failure. Water. Biofuels. Disparity and strife between urban and rural.

• Time running out - India cannot ride on its IIT dividend much longer. There is a so called demographic dividend of 500 mil young (check numbers) by 2020/25. India can be the world’s knowledge factory, as China is the world’s manufacturing and Brazil the world’s farm. But this dividend is a millstone if they cannot capitalize on educating the young. BOP plays a role in education, healthcare in a sustainable, constrained resources manner.

• BOP framework? - Works because very cheap, satisfy one wide need, create value – earn money, more productive, big bang marketing so you have to have it, simple to use, universal esp non educated and illiterate, work well from day one, services added regularly, walked into a vacuum. Is this the formula for BOP? Answers 4C needs – communicate, consumption, compete, care.

• BOP energy – Fuel crisis of future will affect all societies. India’s potential is to move away from farm jobs into newly created jobs for agribusiness, biofuels. It’s sadly easier to export than sell inside India.

• BOP healthcare – no new ideas. Seems to be able to tap on maybe middle BOP, but not BOP.

• BOP education – not impressive. They are feeling in the dark. Having cheap laptops is noise, no starter. No new ideas. Seem to blame govt.

• BOP Investing – microfinance mchek’s way interesting. • BOP ICT – spoken web. Crossing the chasm, no early adopters. Govt should

play this role, but it isn’t and gets in the way. Lack a whole support ecosystem to allow solutions to scale.

• BOP media – billion cameras. Interesting tag ‘power of computer to power of network to power of people’, enabled via cameras and mashups. People ‘sousveillance’ of government.

• BOP technology – cannot take mainstream technology and scale it down. Doesn’t work. Have to create from scratch with BOP as end market. Even if you start from selling at top of pyramid.

• BOP entrepreneurs – are NOT bottom of innovation pyramid. But as IIM’s example shows, they lack the platform to scale, or crowdsource. If you cannot standardize it and sell, no infrastructure to reward innovation.

Overall view – Lots of innovation, but BOP is not a source of growth yet due to lack of govt framework, policy, scalable infrastructure to cross the chasm. None of the above seems to be scalable within India. Better instead to source IP for export to China to manufacture. Oh dear. Get

• IIM’s Discovery channel ‘My Technology’ ads for amphibious bicycle, tree climber etc. Good clips.

• Youtube mchek Is it worth attending next year?

• Yes, one more chance. Who else is looking at India’s future? Followups

• This crisis is an opportunity for nations to reinvent themselves. How is India reinventing itself? Future of India demand?

Day one of Emtech India – Takeaways Pradeep Gupta, Technology review India publisher. India is taking up their ancient mantle of knowledge superpower in the present age. In thirty years, India will be the third largest market in the world. No longer a consumer of innovation, but already now has a generator of new innovations. (to do: sign up for Technology Review India, launch in June 2009. Maybe sign up for future annual Emtech India?) Jason Pontin, MIT technologyreview.com editor. This is the coming decade of India’s dominance in alternative fuels, biotech. Vikram Kumar, villagers can use portable set to diagnose each other. Tapan Parik, created cellphone software for Kerala fishermen to get better prices for their catch. Technologies focus on BOP, the bottom billion. India has something specific to offer the world. If world is to have the same standard of living, it will not be building out wasteful technologies as in the USA. It will be how to resources well, it will be sustainable, and it is likely it will originate from India. India will be a leading provider of these technologies. Emtech and technologyreviewIndia will be the vehicle to showcase these technologies. Prof Menon, renowned physicist and policy maker Proud of Warren Buffett’s possible successor, Indian born and IIT graduate. India has some of the best brains, must continue to tap on them to make SGP home and base of operation. For technologies to succeed, the market must want them. Akio Morita speech at Royal Society. Science not equal to Technology, Technology not equal to Innovation. Innovation is not discovery alone, it relates to ecological system where it flowers. Si valley has combination of fresh technology from Stanford and people who know how to produce. Plus finance and law. And failure can be a success. No one is afraid of failure. Success is built on failure. So much of India’s success is built by the tip of the iceberg (the IITs, NRIs), what can we do to unlock the rest of the iceberg. India’s success in the future depends on this. Institutes need autonomy. Green revolution succeeded in India’s ability to bring together an irrigation system, new land holding systems together with technologies from overseas. Food is a concern, especially with climate change onset. Neelam Dhawan, MD HP India Brazil, China and India are new originators of innovation. Blah corporate spiel. (To do: Demos’ review of these three giant’s innovation should be posted up and maybe a two, three pager or SCG is useful. Post it up when you get back.)

Fireside chat: Touching a billion lives through healthcare • Telemedicine via village hospitals. About 2000 in India now. But not enough,

Apollo is building a ‘health superhighway’. Good healthcare can easily add 3-5% to GDP. Pushing for BPP partnership. (healthcare is socially explosive, I don’t think BPP will work.)

• Dupont’s point is to improve agriculture yields and let rising incomes take care of healthcare. Nothing to dispute there, but also nothing new. Interesting example, Dupont put one agro-nomist in remote states and it raised the productive yields across the whole state, solving problem of information dissemination solved thousands of smaller secondary problems. Dupont thinks this is also possible for healthcare. What is the crux to raise productivity?

• Universal insurance will also help break the poverty-debt cycle. • Lack of healthcare facilities. Add 100,000 hospital beds, add more nurses,

doctors etc. But have to fund this. Also bring up the awareness of primary healthcare. US$200 bil roughly. Education. Don’t believe government should do this other than subsidizing the poor. Make it a private sector delivered infrastructure.

• Universal e-medical records. Can create employment for 1 million people in India. Reddy’s health superhighway, not just Apollo-centric.

Next Billion Cameras: MIT Media Lab Ramesh Raskar, Camera Culture http://raskar.info (check it out)

• Zero to a billion cameras on phones being sold every year, in six years. How can we get something like MIT Media Lab to be in SGP? Tracking new media culture for Asia? It’s industry-collaboration mainly, it can be done.

• New lab initiatives - Center for Future Banking sponsored by BoA, Center for Future Civic Media, Center for Future Storytelling.

• Plymouth Rock Studios collaborating with Center for Future Storytelling to manage tension between master storytelling and mass storytelling from Youtubes etc.

• Smart Cities on synthetic neurobiology by Vinay Gidvaney. Check it out. • Now use software to digitally refocus software. Cool. No need lens. • Flutter Shutter Camera • Hire artists to draw what can be photographed? Because it strips down to

essential information as cartoons. Now with a cartoon camera, you can. • Long distance bar-codes. Upgrade bar codes for the next billion cameras. It’s

only 3mmx3mm, called bokeh-based code. Beyond QR. • Visual social computing. Inverse computing where it recognizes images.

Powershifts from power of the processor to power of the network (SUN) to power of the people, where people ARE the computer. Crowdsourcing using Amazon’s mechanical turk. Is it a business model for India? Outsourcing?

• Cameras in BOP villages work because they are illiterate, but visual computing makes it possible. New business model?

• Photosynth – take picture, upload, mashup with maps, updated daily map for city planning, disaster management, health centers, schools, traffic jams etc. Interactive city management platform. Citizen groups will intervene to ask for more resources or plan.

• Citizen’s socio-political creator of media, different from old media and government. A billion TV stations. Beyond text, but reaching out to BOP.

Truth can emerge from a billion TV stations? People become savvy with interpreting fixed images, and bring up truth, from a billion TV stations.

• Visually challenged solutions via www.seeingwithsound.com Touching a billion lives through education

IITs only touch 0.0001%pop. How to use technology to reach across mismatch. Else India runs out of steam. No-frills laptop is one answer. Design curriculum to be activity-based learning. School in a box is given away. Your technology changes the way you access the world, the laptop has keyboards that allow language diversity. How to ensure quality of education? They are all feeling in the dark.

Lighting for the Billions – perspectives in LED lighting Rajesh Kunnath LED 2.0

• Only few existing LED products are good for general lighting. High capex costs.

• Trying to define an LED platform. Solar powered LEDs can be deployed at a lower cost than any other lighting solution.

Touching a billion lives: Alternate energy

Fuel crisis will affect all societies. We didn't have any product to copy so we had to develop it. Today biggest exporter of solar products in India. Biomass for energy, creates jobs for India, income for farmers. Can economic growth rely on alternate energy? Create systems roi in three years for 1kw to 5kw. Yes it's easier to export than to sell inside India. Sunshine is largest asset. Battery technology is bottleneck. Germany is most successful, but India is not so efficient. There is so much to do bringing the current system to be efficient, more gains there then innovation. Unstable oil prices.. Kills policy innovation and political will to change. LED is future of lighting, saves energy. Make an intelligent grid. Algae has big potential to compete with oil.

Ideas for new India from MIT

New India comes of age. Where are we at 2030? Big if is the environment, exported software and goods, disparity between urban and rural India will lead to social strife. All dreams will fail. Massive rural employment is needed.100 mil non farm jobs, so much rich cultivated land! Must produce for export with jatropha oil seed trees etc agribusiness and biofuels are future industries of India. India has comparative advantage. No to manufacturing. Take reserves back, build infrastructure, integrate gray economy and then tax them. Artificial rain. Insure farmers crops. Clean drinking water... Agrotechnologies. Godrej: Raise capital productivity. Now at times of economic stresses, need to

lower taxes to raise revenues, invest in infrastructure, affordable housing, most important is primary education. Earlier tertiary investments run out. Need higher use of education investments. Water and biofuels.

Day Two Innovative Applications for BOP Customers: Alcatel Lucent India

• Boring…MIT put BOP on web, six years old, courseware (check it out) Information Extraction Technology, Yahoo Labs Disaster! Touching a Billion Lives: ICT

• Works because very cheap, satisfy one wide need, create value – earn money, more productive, big bang marketing so you have to have it, simple to use, universal esp non educated and illiterate, work well from day one, services added regularly, walked into a vacuum. Is this the formula for BOP?

• Mobile web is future, broadband and cheap. • Vacuum of internet. Inaccessible to vast market of India. Develop a web for

illiterate, called ‘Spoken Web’ by IBM. Not websites, these are voicesites, interconnected with hyperspeech links. The spoken web? Just call a number.

• Four needs communicate, consume (food, health), compete, care/secure. Mobile for communicate, anymore? Consumption, lack of information that ag land is optimally utilized for crop growing, a low cost testing capacity for farmer to maximize crop production, feed into national database that has crop prices to maximize production. Health, health in a box, a chip to monitor your vital stats transmit the data that can monitor your health and alert you, for farmers. Care, security to locate individuals cheaply, scale, integrate.

• HP Innovation for the next billion… how do you scale? US and Israel innovation clusters work, why not India? Enough demand, talent, missing is early adopter, crossing the chasms, don’t have. Chasm part we get stuck. We can’t scale it then. Stuck in public sector discussion. Unproven ideas need to be tested, and scaled. Then India can lead the world. We are more successful outside India than inside India. Gesture keyboard, lots of awards but no takeup. Economic buyer is not BOP, someone else buying like schools.

• Low cost PC for a very long time, but just noise. Why don’t they work? Affordable mah…

• IBM: Easy to use and vacuum. PC is tech of the past, it’s mobile delivery. What are we lacking. Products are made for India, not Western world. Lacking a whole support ecosystem that allows you to scale. Govt plays a significant constructive role, partnering with industry. US govt recognizes some technologies to speed up and bring into industry. Mobile happened despite govt.

• Is govt really enough? • Agilent: how do you make govt proactive about needs? India government is

reactive. • Why is it just the government?

• HP Lab: Mobile banking is huge opportunity? Cannot have without regulatory framework to create level playing field. Government must be there.

• What more can the corporate sector do? • IBM: What can we do despite the government? Challenge, you need that

support ecosystem. Initial nascent stages because often business has to get to a certain level before it becomes meaningful to a company. Take it from the labs to potential … crossing the chasm.

• What comes first, product or market? • Agilent: What is purchasing power of a village? You can figure out the

purchasing power of the village based on market research. So yes, while government is needed. And yes, they have become more enabling to their credit. It’s not about market share, but creating new markets. Creating a new market at the lower end of the market is a huge responsibility. I worked for GE, an ultrasound machine, we stripped down the ultrasound machine for the village, created a new market. So areas where regulatory stuff is needed, I don’t think it will grow. Otherwise, no problem

• QnA. How about corporate philanthropy? Can’t rely on that. Touching a Billion Lives: Investing in India How can VCs touch the bottom billion? Where would you invest?

• Kerala civil servant. Not all government is a barrier to growth. Kerala is the exception. There are investment opportunities despite the current crisis. Growth story of India is sustained, accelerated, it must tackle bottom billion.

• VC. Mobile space mcheck, clean tech, Internet services. New areas are education (skills development), healthcare (primary, aggregator of tier one tier two hospitals), information bureaus reach out middle of pyramid, bottom of pyramid. Micro transactions. Bigger challenge is can find these entrepreneurial teams? VCs can find them?

• Civil. Rural common service center project. Getting internet services out in the rural area. Govt funds the viability gap, and private sector puts in money. Signalling effect. Rural telecom towers ditto. Move on from mobile to substandard technology ie healthcare, education, cleantech. Not enough rollout.

• Can IIT, Si Valley, IAS officers are the best people to make those decisions for bottom billion?

• VC. Biggest challenge is hiring people on the street. Tech can make it efficient. There are no information bureaus, have to start collecting data, then make sense with that. At top of the pyramid in cities, find passionate people then go work with middle/bottom of pyramid to localize it. VCs have to be comfortable sitting with them in the boardroom, it’s unusual.

• Civil. Microfinance. Techno innovation makes it possible, but business innovation must come from trenches. Starting to see this marriage.

• How do you exit? No clear exit strategy, or IPO. What do you do? • VC. 4 classifications. better faster cheaper - bpo. Localizations of global

business model - amazon. India’s growth story – hotels, airport. Disruptive innovation – most exciting. First assumption takes five to seven years. Second assumption startups in India have high cost, not low cost. Me-too sector. Have to get to $50 mil revenues. M&A viewpoint, overseas buyers want to buy, more value. Sprint and also a marathon.

Touching a Billion Lives: Bottom of Pyramid Technology

• How do you take a mainstream app and scale it for bottom billion? • Difficult to scale something down, have to design for mass market right from

the beginning. Start thinking BOP straight away. You may want to introduce top of pyramid down.

• Getting to bottom of pyramid is tough. Design it so that it can be distributed easily. Partner with people at the bottom, because you don’t know how to get there. What can get down there? It is very hard.

• Architect your entire business so you are dealing with BOP, it’s not just technology. (Like SQ spins off Silkair and Jetstar).

• IIM. BOP is NOT bottom of innovation pyramid. Poor are rich in creativity, and how get more out of less. Success at BOP is not necessarily having a product scale for all BOP. It may not. Concepts may scale. Example is mobile phone with only three buttons, one for each family member. Not buying a standard phone for all. Make it a modular design. Decompose the technology so you can add what you need. These BOP are entrepreneurs, don’t need money, just need platforms, like magazines to spread their ideas.