标签: Valley

When you talk about technology innovation, you don’t often think of India. Of course, the nation’s big IT companies have performed well on the global IT stage, but as Supriyo Chaudhuri commented in his article, ‘The End of Indian IT Industry?’, that is because it has been driven largely by a business model based on creating huge pools of qualified programmers and other IT workers at low cost, and modelled around a process-driven industrial culture.  Not necessarily technology innovation. You could also argue that there are many multinational tech companies with their design centres in India – in Bangalore, Noida, Gurgaon and other cities.  It is true that these design centres might have contributed to the latest technologies, but they haven’t necessarily been the originators of the ideas – they are often just outsourced processing centres for large scale designs, with the design ideas and requirement specifications coming from places like the USA and Europe. So when ministers and political advisors make bold visions or initiate schemes to enhance technology innovation, one always hopes that it will trigger some change in India that will create great thinkers who are capable of creating new technology innovations – and improve India’s position in global innovation rankings. This month, both the chief minister for the state of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, and chairman of the National Innovation Council , Sam Pitroda, made announcements which they hope will enable this change for India. Narendra Modi outlined his ICT industry vision for the country, and Sam Pitroda announced that 100 innovation hubs would be established throughout the country by 2017, to encourage school children to explore scientific discoveries. Speaking in a recent interview, India’s Narendra Modi said, “My vision for IT sector is that it develops the capacity and capability to become the engine of innovation and the driver of growth in the years to come. I see the IT industry as an engine for making India the knowledge superpower and an agent of change that touches lives of the poorest of the poor, for their empowerment.” Like every tech aspirational nation, he talks about wanting to create an environment where India becomes the home of the next Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon.  In particular he believes that India could become the next hub of cloud infrastructure, exploiting the synergistic opportunities from co-locating non-conventional energy projects and massive data centres in areas where there is little scope for agriculture or manufacturing. He talks about the internet being paramount, with e-governance and m-governance being key drivers in empowering the public. In the telecoms sector, the tele-density in rural areas is still too low he suggests, at 40 percent (compared to 145 percent in urban areas). Hence there is an urgent need to conclude the national optical fibre network (NOFN) project that would help bridge the urban-rural digital divide. He cites the example in his own state of Gujarat where he is taking broadband connectivity to all villages using satellite infrastructure in order to provide citizen-centric services and quality long distance education to rural areas. Modi also says in the interview that he wants India to be an innovation hub in ICT, creating a stronger collaboration between industry, academia and the venture capital industry. He believes that more synergies need to be created between the country’s national security needs and its technology incubation system, with greater participation of the private sector in defence manufacturing and research. Some of Modi’s words reflect what’s already happening in industry. At the recent TiE Entrepreneurial Summit in Hyderabad, there was much talk of the cloud being a big business opportunity for Indian firms large and small, especially with a government focus on the use of cloud for implementing public services.  Other areas that would drive opportunities for cloud businesses include e-commerce and healthcare.  Also, India’s HCL Technologies (India NSE: HCLTECH) has announced a strategic partnership with Computer Sciences Corporation (NYSE: CSC) to address the substantial market opportunity created by the need for enterprise clients to modernize their applications and transition to the cloud.  HCL and CSC will create an application modernization delivery network to enable enterprises to shift from legacy technologies to a cloud-enabled platform. The first delivery centres will be launched in Bangalore and Chennai, and will focus on the banking and financial services verticals initially. Sam Pitroda, who is also adviser to the Prime Minister on public information infrastructure and innovations, emphasised his innovation hubs initiative is focused on schools creating their own innovation labs. He said, "The school principals and science teachers will have to take the lead.” The innovation labs would be equipped with multimedia kits, tech labs for robotics and microprocessor programming. Students are encouraged to identify real-life problems, investigate projects and work for solutions under the guidance of experts. The Indian minister’s vision points to a focus on innovation related to cloud and internet, with a key attention to cybersecurity, public services, and public citizen empowerment. These are not very different to many emerging countries’ agendas, but in India, these public statements demonstrate the higher place on the political agenda for technology and innovation. Added with the innovation hubs planned for schools, if this scales up in any way, in a few years India itself might be driving the ideas for global technology innovation. This article is based on a report first published in The Next Silicon Valley.

This valley is not that far, perhaps a 45-60-minute Cessna hop from Reid-Hillview Airport. That would be your best option if you wouldn't be risking snapping a wheel strut on landing. By car (and make it a sturdy one), the trip eats up the better part of a day with a Sierra ascent and descent and a final, hours-long drive over a lonely and pitiless gravel road near Death Valley that chews up tyres and drivers' nerves. Once you stop and kill your engine at the base of this valley and untangle your nerves, listen for a second; the expanse swallows sound. Then give your eyes a second to comprehend the ghostly white sight before you, anÿelephantine, rolling 700-foot-high mountain of smooth white sand that seems to have been plopped in the middle of nowhere, completely out of context.   Eureka SandDunes from Space   This is the Eureka Sand Dunes. They have nothing to do with the Silicon Valley, yet they have everything to do with the Silicon Valley. "Father" Fred Fred Emmons Terman was a Stanford brat. His father was a professor there off Palm Drive, down "on the Farm," who sparked gut-churning anxiety among generations of young parents after he popularized the IQ test. Young Fred had brilliance and promise and an entrepreneurial bent. (The story goes that he hiked into the Palo Alto hills to collect mistletoe and sell it during the holidays to Stanford faculty wives who were afraidÿof catching poison oak if they foraged themselves). Perhaps not surprisingly, he did well in school, landing a chemistry degree and a master's in electrical engineering from Stanford. But even a generation or two after Stanford and the University of California had thrown off their training wheels and become established as institutions of higher learning, a promising west Coast student in the 1920s still had to go east "to put spit and polish on his education," Terman would say later. So he hopped aboard a train that chugged east and deposited him in the land of dropped Rs, rocky soil and Puritan values. There, at MIT, he got his doctorate working under the brilliant engineer Vannevar Bush. Ph.D. pigskin in hand, Terman hopped the first train heading west, heading home.   Fred Emmons Terman   Terman, for whatever reason—the climate, his family, the rolling sage-scented hills around Palo Alto—essentially never left after that, and he became an evangelist for valley-grown companies. He wanted the saplings he nurtured in the Stanford engineering department to put down roots nearby like the fruit trees in the orchards that sprawled from just outside the campus down to Gilroy and points unknown. And nurture he did. Dave Packard. Bill Hewlett. The Varian Brothers. Litton Industries. Watkins-Johnson.ÿAfter the war, when everything was sunny, warm and up and to the right in the Golden State, Terman was instrumental in building his own version of a farm, a technology park for budding companies, nurturing ideas sometimes crazy (mad) but often sound. It was an idea for an area that would become the crucible of the future. Conveniently at the same time capital and government policies were evolving to create what became the venture capital business. Men like Georges Doriot, the "father of venture capitalism," Ralph Flanders and Karl Comptonÿand others helped nurtured a form of capital formation that shifted start-up investment sources from the gilded piggybanks of already wealthy families to other investors. In part, Terman got this insight during the war, when he went east again to work on a major radar project at Vannevar Bush's request. He returned to Palo Alto with keen insights to the value of networking and collaboration. He was insistent that students educated locally should have the opportunity to build businesses locally. Otherwise they would continue to migrate back east where the technical jobs were. In the 1950s, Terman convinced Stanford to lease some of its 8,000 un-sellable acres to start-up technology companies. The Stanford Industrial Park, now SRC, was born. Terman convinced Shockley to come home to Palo Alto; Shockley begat Shockley Transistors, which begat Fairchild Semiconductor, which begat 38 companies over time, the most notable being Intel. The degree of separation between your work and Fred Terman is undoubtedly very small. It is the stuff of lore and legend, and Terman stands above this sizzling swirling soup of invention, investment, destruction and resurrection and reinvention as its progenitor.   Toasting Shockley   But Terman came late to the party. Ancient history Sixty-five million years ago began the Cenozoic period, a time in which the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west of Silicon Valley and the Mount Diablo Range to the east were thrust onto the scene. As such, the valley became a "structure valley" because of that building action, as opposed to an "erosional valley." This ancient, snarling, violent birth yielded a valley sheltered and fertile, a place theÿSpanish explorers considered to have the best climate in the world. And its origin as a structure valley arguably turns out to be more than just metaphoric. **** The frontier In 1893, a Wisconsin academic, Frederick Jackson Turner, presented a paper in Chicago describing the frontier's seminal impact on the development of America and the American character. Turner feared that the closing of the frontier might hamstring or destroy American dynamism. Around the same time, San Jose's population was exploding 50 years after the discovery of gold in California. More than 18,000 people lived in the Santa Clara Valley, and the population was increasing at 30 and 40 per cent per year. But California was the end of the road for this massive, historical migration west. Just over the Santa Cruz Mountains lay the shimmering blue of the Pacific Ocean, the end of the continent. There was no more land to explore, conquer, develop and farm. The frontier was closed. Yet wagon- and train-loads full of people continued to crash into California, the end of the trail.   Old San Jose map   **** Swirling eddies Geologists describe something called the aeolian effect. Wind whisks up the top layer of earth—its finest particles—and sweeps them off somewhere to be deposited in some form. Often those depositions undergo another aeolian effect and end up somewhere else or scattered, literally, to the four winds. In Eureka Valley, the aeolian process swept up the parched, scorched cover layer of an otherwise rocky terrain and has created a natural wonderland in the Eureka Sand Dunes. When the wind picks up here, you can hear is the sound of trillions of sand pebbles whisking across the desert floor or across each other. The smooth white dunes have never dissipated because of their location: The dunes, surrounded on three sides by mountains, have nowhere to go. Over time, the wind, rather than just blowing the huge sand hills into memory or the next county, reforms them as part of this aeolian process....a sand eddy if you will. The big white elephant shifts, grows, shrinks, wiggles a little this way or that. But it's always there. **** Tale of two valleys Fred Terman is considered the father of the Silicon Valley or at least of the dynamic we associate with the Silicon Valley—that relentless drive to innovate, try, fail, try succeed, and improve, tweak, tinker, revolutionise. History is dotted with Fred Termans whose genius and influence migrated away from their place. But there's something different about this place, a valley shaped by ancient forces...aoelian and Cenozoic forces.   The forces of nature have, for generations since the 19th century, swept up a certain type of people and transported them to the western edge of the North American continent where they hit a valley bounded on three sides by mountains—a "building" valley, not an erosional valley. There, an eddy of ingenuity, of invention and innovation began and continues to swirl today, just like the Eureka Sand Dunes. The energy, the ideas and the people swirl around, reforming, rising, fall and rising again but never, ever, vanishing.   Brian Fuller EE Times

Over the last few months, The Next Silicon Valley has worked closely with various innovation and science park conferences around the world, and noticed the distinct absence of India from much of this – yet Latin America, Africa, Russia and China were well represented. This could be interpreted as meaning India is on top of innovation and doesn’t need the world to tell it how to do innovation and hence they do not need to meet their global peers. In addition, recent reports on India as a potential ‘fallen BRIC angel’ in a Standard Poor’s report, as well as its low ranking way below all the other BRIC countries in the global innovation index released by the business school INSEAD, seem to suggest India is losing its charm on the international stage. But on the other hand, we keep hearing about India’s relative success in creating ‘frugal innovation’ where innovative solutions are developed at low cost or with limited resource, or by trimming all the ‘bells and whistles’ from a product or service to address a specific need at lower cost than might have been previously possible with a more complex product or solution (an example is the Chotukool fridge, a top-loading, compact and portable cooling solution weighing only 7.8kg with no compressor, but running instead on a cooling chip along with a fan similar to those used to cool computers). And in The Next Silicon Valley ,  a paper has just been published outlining a vision of innovation in telecoms, internet, media and edutainment, with examples of how some of this is already being implemented in India (for example offering a PC in the form of software as a service and wellness apps technology – see below). In addition Sam Pitroda, adviser to the Indian Prime Minister for public information infrastructure innovations, made a rousing speech to the Indian diaspora at TiECON 2012 in Santa Clara, CA, USA back in May of this year, calling on all the Indian technology entrepreneurs in the audience to go back to India and help in whatever way possible to ‘come back to India’ and impart their knowledge to Indian entrepreneurs and creators of the innovation ecosystem back in India. His message was that India needs all the help it could get. And only in the last few weeks, India’s Prime Minister said that he is dedicating something like US$880 million a year towards making India an ‘innovation hub’. The Indian PM wants innovation to address the issues of poverty, health and environment rather than focusing on the needs of the rich. “Innovation can be a game changer to move from incremental change to radical change,” he said.  The government has set up a National Innovation Council headed by Sam Pitroda to draw up a national innovation road map. The government has also agreed to set aside fund of US$88 million for the India Inclusive Innovation Fund to help entrepreneurs start business based on their innovations. The changing landscape of technology innovation and its advance in India In a paper published in The Next Silicon Valley , Delhi-based technologist, innovator and entrepreneur Anuraj Gambhir looks at the changing global landscape of the converging world between communications, consumer and technology, and how we are going to see even more innovation in technology that will continue to change many aspects of modern life – and especially in healthcare, wellness and education. In particular he highlights some key examples of innovation in these areas taking place in his home country, India. In the cloud computing space, in terms of context and relevance to the mass consumer, he highlights one interesting example of a highly innovative IIT-Madras spinout company called Novatium Solutions, offering computing for the next billion via PCaaS (PC-as-a-service). As a dynamic thick-thin client and using a smart combination of grid/cloud and utility computing, it is a paradigm shift transforming a computer into an appliance – it switches on in a few seconds, faster than several LCD TVs. This new age cloud computing is highly scalable with flexible services that are easily consumable over the Internet through a low-touch, as-needed, pay-per-use business model. Shared and optimal use of scarce resources is fundamental to scaling the offering. As a family/shared computer, it is beginning a revolution in internet computing for a substantial number of segments and a large addressable population. A simple widget approach with one click to dedicated apps makes it highly compelling and brings the ease of use necessary for mass adaption. Broadband penetration will have a much greater impact in emerging markets with solutions deployed in the cloud space that are very simple to use.  Cloud has a multi-dimensional approach to computing that takes advantage of the scale of the Internet to connect people to each other, to information, and to do computing in new ways. Wellness is another area in which India (and other parts of the world) is seeing convergence with technology and the mobile world. With rising stress levels, the desire for harmonious living and a balanced well-being is increasingly important. Hence there is likely to be disruptive innovation in the making where mobile devices will utilize all five senses and go beyond that with the integration potential from the healthcare/fitness-sports domain and also involving subtler spiritual aspects. Gambhir says this is being led well in India – the home of Ayurveda, spirituality, yoga, meditation, Art of Living, naturopathy, aromatherapy and more. Lives could be transformed with a ‘spa’ in people’s hands that will greatly enrich their well-being. Wirelessly enabled sensors of various types will take on the form to create whole new products and experiences. In this case networked heart rate, pulse, glucometer, mind sensors will assist with measuring stress and other health variables so that we can proactively manage well-being. There is a potential to use camera phones (via optical detection) to check blood pressure and heart health (e.g. pulse, respiration, blood-oxygen levels) that has been proven by the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program. A glimpse of the above is already visible via the multitude of apps available mostly for iOS and Android platforms e.g. Yogalite, Medicine Buddha, iRelax, Fitness Trainer, iZen. With the worlds of augmented reality, 3D, holography coming together along with embedded sensors, very interesting mashups of apps and content are likely to come into play. Education and healthcare are also becoming more critical as global emerging economies grow along with other industry verticals such as government and transportation playing important roles in the infrastructure development. An initiative (rather showcase) in India called Gramjyoti (meaning ‘light of the village’) put Ericsson at the forefront of demonstrating a meaningful application of 3G/HSPA mobile technology for the masses and rural (generally underserved) parts of the population. Tele-medicine (in partnership with Apollo hospital), tele-education, e-governance were exhibited with direct benefits for the rural communities in 18 towns and villages in Tamil Nadu (southern India). Gambhir also talks about the content industry undergoing major transformations, as the key players attempt to address the most compelling needs in the market. In India for example, we are evolving from the ‘astrology, Bollywood, cricket and devotional’ content genres to a much wider selection of locally and contextually relevant vernacular content. Multimedia in all its forms is having profound implications – such as video which itself is predicted to account for 66% of global mobile data traffic by 2014; some organizations such as Huawei predict much higher figures. A picture tells a thousand words, but moving images or video a million. It transcends the language barrier and a lot can be told by just body language and motion. Video conferencing is making a comeback with increased significance and value for rural folks migrating to peri-urban/metros, to keep in touch with their families. A pilot in India called ‘Aamne-Saamne’ (meaning in front of each other) with a 3G operator is already revealing promising results. Video brings a mass emotional connect for communities – to see and talk with families who feel never away from home. Video is also a universal media as it can play a vital role in education specially in reaching out to the illiterate. India’s place in global innovation So if we are seeing all this activity, why does India rank so low in the innovation index? According to Gopichand Katragadda, managing director of General Electric’s John F. Welch Technology Center in Bangalore, “The results of the study point to the fact that, in India, the innovation ecosystem (input) is poor while the knowledge/creative output under the constraints is good. One interpretation of this is that we need better government measures on regulations, education and infrastructure to tap the demonstrated potential of talented people.” According to Katragadda, if India does not get its act together on the innovation front, the country could lose the opportunity ‘to make this a century of Indian innovation, tapping into the brilliant technical minds of the region.’ In the past I have written about India being great at producing talent that can follow a process and follow instructions either in software or hardware or research and development – but not necessarily in creating totally new innovation. But we have seen glimpses of innovation in areas as highlighted above in cloud computing, communications, health and education. In the past, technology ministers in Indian government have openly declared that India has been good at ‘screwdriver technology’ – in other words assembling or disassembling technology, products or solutions from other parts of the world. The indicators today from studies like that created by INSEAD (the global innovation index) seem to suggest that India still has some way to go to really impact the global stage with its innovation.

Last week, I attended the TiECon 2012 conference in Silicon Valley, the annual conference of Indian entrepreneurs from around the world. Some 3,200 people from the USA and around the world attended the conference, and we heard some great keynotes from prominent Indian entrepreneurs in the USA.   The two keynotes at the conference that stood out for me were those by Anant Agarwal, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and director of CSAIL, computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory, with his keynote on organic computing; and Sam Pitroda, adviser to the Indian Prime Minister for public information infrastructure innovations, who talked about 'Igniting Innovation in India'.   I met with Sam Pitroda at the conference and it was good to see that the vision with which he set about helping transform the Indian tech sector some 20 years ago, still remains a passion for him.   At the TiECon 2012 (http://www.tiecon.org/content/conference-overview) keynote he delivered at the end of the conference to a packed audience with standing room only, he called upon the Indian diaspora to make their contribution to the Indian tech sector – by providing knowledge and expertise.   He said that the years 2010 to 2020 would be the decade of innovation in India. A National Innovation Council was already announced back in March, with 20 Chief Ministers having already set up innovation councils.   He also talked about healthcare and education being key areas needing support – he said that India is spending $70 billion on education but that is still not enough. The country is also spending about $100m on smart grid field trials.   One of the messages he gave towards the beginning of the speech referred to India looking to copy  the USA model for economic growth – and he warned that while India wanted to copy the USA, the country (India) needs its own growth model.   Many regions around the world do indeed try to copy the USA for encouraging growth in the tech sector and particularly Silicon Valley in California (see http://thenextsiliconvalley.com/). There are some lessons that can be learned from the effect that Silicon Valley has on tech businesses and innovation – as referred to in my article, ‘Learning from Silicon Valley’, in which I write about my experience having just returned from a week in Silicon Valley. As always, I get a lot of inspiration from the way things work and happen in the Valley.     To find out more about why Silicon Valley works, in my opinion, click here: http://thenextsiliconvalley.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/learning-from-silicon-valley/