Monsoon Multimedia, another award winner, has created a white-labeled home device for place-and-time shifting. This slim box, the size of a hardcover book, is now being sold by electronics retailers like Fry’s.
The product innovation ecosystem has significantly improved in the last two years. This momentum is likely to continue, in part, because of the local domestic market opening up. The local market is not only shoring up the product ecosystem; it’s also underpinning the creation of another related ecosystem.

Bottom-of-the-Pyramid Innovation Ecosystem–Nascent But Promising
Bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) is a big opportunity segment for IT. Right now little or no IT is consumed by micro-firms. India alone has more than 7 million micro-firms that are doing well and are hungry to leverage affordable IT. If the IT industry can figure out right affordable solutions then a whole new wave of consumption will get triggered.
A BoP innovation ecosystem is similar to a product ecosystem but has important differences as well. One difference is that a BoP solution is almost never a tweaked version of what exists today. Jeffrey Immelt of GE, summed this up in a recent interview saying that “the right solution is not an American product stripped down to meet an Indian price, but a truly Indian product designed from the ground up to carry an Indian price”.
More importantly, the difference is that, very often, the final solution is not a product at all! It ends up being a mix of products, - internet services, mobile content, and micro-franchising. So creating this solution requires not only breakthrough product architectures, process models, and/or business models, but also building of new market structures and value chains.
Building a BoP solution is a daunting challenge. The only way to meet this challenge is to embrace in-market incubation of products and business models.
India is fast emerging as the preferred incubation lab for BoP solutions. There are three factors driving this.

• India has the most experience with BoP solutions till date.
• The rapid economic growth has created favorable market conditions for BoP solutions in a range of areas, including IT.
• Early BoP incubation efforts have had promising results.
Texas Instruments has launched an ultra-low-cost-cellphone chipset, LoCosto, which was conceived and engineered in India. Intel has experimented with its Classmate solution to tackle the One-Laptop-Per-Child opportunity. Nokia has struck gold with its inexpensive no-frills made-for-India handset whose killer feature is a built-in flashlight.
A promising BoP incubation effort was one of the award winners. HP Labs in India has developed a touch-keypad specifically for Indian non-English speaking consumers who are not familiar with the QWERTY keyboard. Significantly, it makes a number of applications accessible to rural India.
Even though BoP innovation ecosystem is still at a nascent stage of evolution, its emergence is a very promising development not just for India but also for the entire IT industry. This could open the door to a whole new world of consumption of IT products and solutions in a hitherto untouched segment of the market.

Invention-centric Ecosystem – Still Getting Started
BoP solution incubation is inherently an immersive outside-in activity. This is about as different from the conventional invention-centric, inside-out, model of innovation as chalk is from cheese.
This traditional invention model has been centered on research labs either inside the firm or in a university. These research labs create fundamental technology breakthroughs that then get commercialised as new products and features.
This invention-centric ecosystem is still getting started in India. Technology research labs are very new and have only come up within a few MNC IT firms. The universities haven’t yet jumped into this area with vigour. This needs attention.