Catalytic Communities (CatComm), our community partner in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, announced the launch of its new community empowering site www.CatComm.org. CatComm is a huge inspiration for us here at BRINQ, their insights in cultivating and capturing local innovations have been critical to us in our early years and their active work with communities generating solutions has taught us that stronger relationships lead to more viable innovations. In a world of people content with "asking the hard questions", Catalytic Communities is a refreshing example of an organization actually looking for the hard answers.

See the full Catalytic Communities Press Release

Frustrated with the poverty-stricken conditions in which the children of her community, Acarí, in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro lived, Ivanilde Araújo Pinto began sharing her knowledge with them beneath a tree in the community. A piece of wood served as a blackboard and a chunk of charcoal as chalk. This was 20 years ago. Today the Little School of Love operates out of a community church and is proud of its notable accomplishment: not one of its kids, after 20 years of service by Ms. Pinto (50 children per year have been served), has returned to the streets.

Ms. Pinto’s example is not uncommon. Thousands of other community-driven efforts are succeeding in addressing local challenges in Rio de Janeiro and across the world. "These amazing people are out there and no one knows about them. As a result, they get very little support and have a hard time maintaining their efforts," explains Theresa Williamson, Executive Director of Catalytic Communities, "And the work of people like Ms. Pinto, if publicized, can inspire innumerable others to develop projects to better their own communities."

For this reason, since 2000, Williamson has been developing Catalytic Communities (CatComm), a not-for-profit to bring visibility to initiatives like Ms. Pinto’s and many others, around the world. Today CatComm is announcing the launch of its upgraded Website, www.catcomm.org, where visitors can consult, include, or search projects like the Little School of Love in its Community Solutions Database (CSD), which now features over 100 projects from 8 countries on 5 continents.

Catalytic Communities has also issued a fund raising challenge to its network of partners, volunteers and supporters.

"CatComm does all this with very little. Supporters have often told us it is one of the most efficient social investments around," CatComm Founder and Executive Director Theresa Williamson proudly announces. "In fact," she challenges, "if everyone who reads this line visits our Website and donates $10, then asks a friend to do the same, our 2006 budget would be cared for. That’s all it will take to empower and inspire hundreds of community solutions across the world in 2006."

We wish Catalytic Communities the best of luck! If you’re interested in supporting them you can click on the buttom to the right.

For more coverage of Catalytic Communities see:

• BRINQ - Side Effects - A Day in the Community
• BRINQ - Learning to Swim - Back in Brazil

 

After five months of intense work in communities in Kenya and Brazil we’ve got a long backlog of stories to share. Now that we’ve got a short breather we thought we’d post a few. This one from Kenya came up recently when we were asked via our colleague & mentor Stuart Hart, “Have you heard of these XAccess guys?”

Actually, yes we have!

In June the BoP Protocol team headed out to the shores of Lake Victoria in Kisumu, Kenya to visit with the XAccess and KickStart folks who were modifying an innovative bicycle for the local market. XAccess is the non-profit sister of XtraCycle, maker of the world’s first Sport Utility Bicycle, and KickStart, the NGO formerly known as ApproTEC, is a long time provider of enterprise enabling technologies to low-income communities. KickStart is helping XAccess to commercialize its bicycle in Kenya as the “Bigga Boda”, an upgrade to the existing “Boda Boda” bicycle taxis, so named from their early days on the border of Kenya and Uganda where the taxi riders cries of “Border! Border!” eventually morphed into the “Boda Boda” of today.

The lead designer for XAccess in Kisumu was none other than Ed Lucero, legendary kayaker and the world record holder for the longest vertical drop in a kayak (a jaw- and stomach-dropping 106 ft over Canada’s Alexandra Falls). Ed also happens to be an incredibly talented product designer and he described to us how the XAccess kit attaches to existing bicycles, creating a larger, more rugged space for heavier cargo of all sorts while still fitting into Kenya’s existing bicycle landscape and servicescape. Ed is designing a kit which Kenya’s bicycle fundi (craftsmen and repairmen) can use to attach the XAccess frame to local bicycles. The XAccess frame is made from locally available parts and can be modified for various types of bikes.

To cap off our visit, Ed and a colleague took us on a ride around Lake Victoria, where we became the envy of all the local bicycle taxi and cargo operators. “You want to be popular?” Ed said, “just ride one of these bikes around Kisumu and you’re sure to meet lots of new friends.” Common questions we were asked on our ride were “How soon can I get one?” Soon, the program is currently in a test market phase to produce and sell 50-100 bike kits. “How much will it cost?” Not sure, perhaps 3000-4000 Ksh ($40 - $50 US). “How many people can it carry?” Three on a downhill or a straightaway, and uphill depends on the size of your calves, though three people would be tough and heavy cargo like us wazungu, Westerners, could be even tougher.

After days of riding from site to site in the KickStart van, the leisurely pace of a bicycle was a delightful reminder of how much you miss when you just motor through. And fittingly enough when our van’s tires blew out the next day on the potholed roads out of Kisumu, how did we get to the local repairman?

On the back of a bicycle of course!

Click here for more on the XAccess project in Kenya.

Also see: Bambucicletas and Other Cycles of Innovation for past BRINQ coverage.

"I could use a hundred people who don’t know there is such a word as impossible"
- Henry Ford, Sr.

We admit having a bit of a fascination with Henry Ford, a man, who in our minds, was one of the world’s greatest social entrepreneurs and enablers of the common man, who also happened to become insanely wealthy to boot. How could you not be fascinated with him? When people tell us we’re nuts trying to make money working with today’s version of the comman man, the 4+ billion “poor” living in the Base of the Pyramid, we point at Henry Ford and say, "He was nuts too,"and then a moment later add, "and I’m with stupid."

However, it was Ford’s notorious dislike for "experts" that we find the most compelling:

None of our men are "experts." We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the "expert" state of mind a great number of things become impossible.

Of course even Henry Ford eventually fell into this expert trap, misreading the very market he had created, but this fact doesn’t diminish the strength of his lessons, rather it amplifies it. If someone as aware as Henry Ford fell into the expert trap, what’s that mean for the rest of us?

Which brings us to the Base of the Pyramid Protocol and the upcoming field test in Kenya.

The six of us on the Kenya team are, perhaps, experts at something.

One thing we are definitely not, however, are experts on Kenya. We’re not experts on Pyrethrum, a critical crop to the communities we’re engaging. We’re not experts at development either, though we’ve had a little training in participatory techniques. Our knowledge of SC Johnson and ApproTEC, two of the projects key stakeholders, is limited too, certainly no where close to an expert level. Finally, most of us are MBAs, which business school cynics will declare as proof positive that we’ve been specifically trained to be experts at nothing at all. Going into a situation that ignorant, what possibly do the six of us have to offer?

But think about Henry Ford and answer this, which would you rather be in a conversation, the ignorant or the expert?

Our take is that it’s the ignorant who will get the most out of the conversation. After all, by definition an expert already knows everything; someone who is already very familiar with how things should be done, someone who knows the best way forward is to build upon what you already know. Why do they believe this? Because most of the time they’re right; the best way forward often is just getting better at doing the same thing. In computer science lingo this is a "greedy" approach: an easy path to the highest point is just to go up from where you’re already standing. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t help me in a hypothetical climbing competition if I’m on a hill in Wichita and my competitor is at the foot of Mt. Fuji.

So while the world needs experts to climb mountains, we argue that it’s the ignorants who get us to question what a mountain really is in the first place. I may be a great climber, but I’m not going much higher until I recognize that I need to get out of Kansas.

That is, more or less, what the first phase of the Base of the Pyramid Protocol is about, getting us off our mountains via a collision of world views: the ignorant with the expert, the local with the foreign, the "rich" with the "poor". We acknowledge that everyone is an "expert" at something; we acknowledge that everyone is an "ignorant" at something. Then we get busy, as nicely as possible, knocking each other off our respective peaks so we can collectively seek out new mountains to climb; and we level the playing field so that the expert has as much to gain as the ignorant.

How to do that best is what we’re testing in Kenya.

Safi! [Cool!]

As for Henry Ford, we believe he became a victim of his own success. It took another American icon, Alfred Sloan and General Motors, to show Ford that he was on the wrong mountain: people didn’t just want the Model T anymore, they wanted the Cadillac, and in red too.

The world had turned color, yet our foremost expert was still peddling black.

Pretty ignorant, huh?

*Please note, this author aside, the five other members of the Kenya field test team are actually quite an exceptional bunch of folks.

Past “Innovation from the Brinq” articles:
The Power of Play – Why Not? A Guide for Ingenuity – Discordant Notes – Bambucicletas and Other “Cycles” of Innovation – Poor People’s Knowledge – India - Innovation Central – Building a Better ATM – Keeping it Cool

Remember how much fun spinning around on a playground merry-go-round was when we were kids?

In our recent article, Capturing the Unexpected Innovation, we included a picture from a story we knew we had to chase down (see image right). Thankfully, just as we were looking for more, BBC News ran the article, "Why pumping water is child’s play".

"It’s a positive displacement water pump, and as the children spin around it transfers their energy into vertical or reciprocal motion, and that pumps water from an underground borehole or well to the surface where it’s stored in a tank for future use."

With the children pushing the roundabout around 16 times a minute, the play-pump can produce 1,400 litres of water per hour from a depth of 40 metres.

Developed by Roundabout Outdoors, the play pump has been installed in hundreds of locations in South Africa, with the majority of installations at primary schools (with a healthy number of "volunteers"). In addition to providing life-giving water and life-fufilling play, the roundabout’s tank also includes space for four billboards, two for public health messages and two for commercial advertising space; proceeds from the advertising go towards paying for maintenance of the pump.

International organizations such as the Worldbank and the Kaiser Family Foundation (Washington DC) see the playpump as the ideal medium to inform rural populations on the dangers of HIV/AIDS infection. Consequently a large percentage of playpump installations automatically carry HIV/AIDS messaging.

What a great example of the power of play!

Past “Innovation from the Brinq” articles:
Why Not? A Guide for Ingenuity – Discordant Notes – Bambucicletas and Other “Cycles” of Innovation – Poor People’s Knowledge – India - Innovation Central – Building a Better ATM – Keeping it Cool

For those that have followed our work here at BRINQ, our efforts with the toy industry, and our focus on discovering "Innovation in Utility", the Boston Globe has an article which has gotten us really EXCITED!!! It even starts with an example from the toy industry!

Here’s a quick quote, you can find a link to the rest of the article below:

Ultimately, user-centered innovation may transform not only companies’ product development processes but also business models, turning them into the providers of innovation toolkits to users and the marketers of their innovations, [MIT’s] von Hippel suggests.

Innovation toolkits!! We definitely need to talk to this guy!

Links:

• Manufacturers learn from users’ creativity - the Boston Globe
• Democratizing Innovation Von Hippel’s new book, available online via a Creative Commons License
• Slashdot discussion - Slashdot.org - News for Nerds - Stuff that Matters
• Capturing the Unexpected Innovation - BRINQ - Innovation at Play

Where should you look for the unexpected? Try finding a different world view.

"the unexpected success is not just an opportunity for innovation; it demands innovation. It forces us to ask, What basic changes are now appropriate for this organization in the way that it defines its business? Its technology? Its markets? If these questions are faced up to, then unexpected success is likely to open up the most rewarding and least risky of all innovative opportunities."
- Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

At BRINQ, we believe those living in the Base of the Pyramid (BOP), the so-called poor, are a huge source for something unexpected: innovation. And particularly a type which we like to call "innovation in utility", the novel and unexpected ways in which people use technology. It’s simple really, when does your invention become a true innovation?

Somebody uses it.

Lots of somebodies, and often in a way you didn’t expect.

Look at the examples Harvard business guru Clay Christensen gives of disruptive innovations in his pathbreaking work the Innovator’s Dilemma, many of his examples’ early successes came from unexpected uses in unexpected markets. Or take a look at Cemex, which capitalized on the unexpected success of cement sales to Mexico’s poor by developing its Patrimonio Hoy program. Our colleague Gordon Enk (Partners for Strategic Change) summed it up best in a recent conversation, "I don’t think anyone ever sets out to invent a disruptive technology." We believe that’s because invention is about technology, but innovation is about utility, and it’s a near impossible task to guess all the seemingly crazy ways in which people might use your creation, even if those crazy ways determine your future failure or success.

Innovation in utility is rarely discovered inside a corporate R&D lab, rather it’s user and market focused: the more people you observe using your technology or service, the better chance you have to discover an unexpected success. Even better is to find people with an entirely different world view than your own, as they can create possibilities you never dreamed of, and then give them reasons to seek you out. We believe the Base of the Pyramid has a wealth of such perspectives and dreams that are ripe for this purpose.

We recommend two critical components to discovering innovation in utility: casting your net for innovation as far and wide as possible, through product offerings or services, and then drawing the resulting innovative uses back to you. In the remainder of this article we will focus on the second component, drawing the unexpected innovations back to you. We will do this the through the example of the MTN villagePhone venture in Uganda, a new venture which we analyzed in the Spring of 2004 on behalf of the the Grameen Technology Center and the Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab. These concepts (and our introduction of the "Model T Trap") were awarded the BOP Lab’s Best of 2004 Award.

(more…)

The other day, my foster brother Seth and I were speaking about being innovative. Seth is a lead test engineer on a certain eXcellent gaming console in Redmond, WA.

"I don’t think I have it in me," Seth commented, "I can almost always figure out how things work, like noise canceling headsets for example, but I don’t know how people come up with those ideas in the first place."

"Maybe that’s true," I responded, "but I bet that you could be trained."

I like to tell people that creating something innovative and new is like pulling on threads until it leads you to a sweater, or even better yet, it’s like gathering threads into your hands until you finally realize that you’re already holding a sweater. In non-knitting terms, innovation is an organic process, involving questions and observations, and a lot of looking at the world differently. And one of my favorite guides for looking at the world differently is Barry Nalebuff’s and Ian Ayres’ "Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small"

In twenty years and countless adventures in growing our business, our only progress and for that matter our only interesting breakthroughs have resulted from someone asking Why not? Nalebuff and Ayres have crafted an inspiring, imaginative, informative and best of all, fun treatise that will arouse the entrepreneur in all of us. You will fly through this book, and you will never look at a problem the same way again.

—Gary Hirshberg, President and CEO,Stonyfield Farm Yogurt, Inc.

(more…)

A toy designer and BRINQ advisor talked to us yesterday about his recent trip to volunteer in Nicaragua. He shared a number of observations on children there:

"Kids seemed more interested in clothing than toys, we met a lot of people who were much better dressed than we were but who also happened to sleep on dirt floors. Kids wanted better shoes for playing sports and most never had a pair of tennis shoes in their life. But what every child really seemed to want was a bicycle! However, most couldn’t afford them."

If you have spent much time in developing countries, chances are you have seen A LOT of bicycles. I have very vivid memories of crossing through a river of bicycle traffic in Saigon (the trick is to walk slow and steady so they can dodge you) and seeing whole families on a single bike in central Viet Nam. Bicycles are the workhorses of many societies, and it’s no wonder that children want the freedom and mobility bikes represent.

So this got us started on the subject of innovation for bicycles in the Base of the Pyramid. Have people found ways to make bicycles more accesible and useful for the world’s poor? Here are few examples we came across (and don’t forget our previous find of a bicycle that rides on water).

Brazilian inventor, Flavio Deslandes, has invented a bamboo bicycle (Bambucicleta, pictured right):

"Bamboo is a resource of immense potential. And it is strong too. What makes it possible to build bicycles from it is that it is stronger than steel when strained in the longitudinal direction, 17% to be exact."

"This is going to be a revolution: the bicycle wheel made out of bamboo. There is steel in the assemblies of my bicycles. But unlike everything else that is made out of bamboo - for instance the furniture that you talked about - the steel used here serves the bamboo, not the other way around. I use bamboo in its natural form in the bicycle. If you start bending it, drilling holes in it or you put nails or spikes into it you’ll weaken the structure”

"But I keep on researching in order to find even more replacements for the metal parts. This wheel here is one hundred percent bamboo: Rims and hub are made out of laminated bamboo and the spokes are made out of straight bamboo sticks. I also work on being able to produce pedals and pedal arms in bamboo,” Flavio says proudly.

SSAC reports an article from the Calcutta Telegraph about Dodhi Pathak, an Indian inventor of an almost all bamboo bicycle:

"Like most of the innovators, Pathak, too was driven by necessity. He didn’t have money to buy even a second-hand bicycle, so he built a bicycle out of bamboo. Except for tubes and tyres, which are of standard rubber, the piston, handles and barrels of his bicycle are all made of bamboo."

"Pathak belongs to the breed of inventors who, without a laboratory or research infrastructure, and sometimes without a formal education even, have churned out valuable innovations. In addition to meeting their own needs, those inventions may turn into commercial products for the indian,and perhaps even global markets."

Could there be a market to sell bicycle-making kits? Import the chains, spokes, joints and extra parts and then just add your own frame from locally grown bamboo? Would it be cheaper than just importing the whole bike? We’ll have to wait to hear back from our bamboo expert before answering that one. In the meanwhile check out AfriWheels.org and why there is no bicycle that meets the needs of Africa’s poor.

Additional Stories and Links:

• Two more articles in Portuguese (but with photos) on bamboo bicycles:
  Flavio Deslandes (referenced above)
  Milton Felicissimo - another Brazilian inventor
• Pedals for Progress - recycling the millions of discarded bicycles to places that can use them
• The Bicycling Empowerment Network - promoting bicyle mobility in South Africa
• XAccess, based in bike friendly Berkeley, CA, develops low cost cargo systems for bicycles

Past "Innovation from the Brinq" articles:
Poor People’s Knowledge — India - Innovation Central — Building a Better ATM — Keeping it Cool - Clay Pot Refrigeration

"How can we help poor people to earn more from their knowledge—rather than from their sweat and their muscle? This book is about promoting the innovation, knowledge, and creative skills of poor people in poor countries, and particularly about improving the earnings of poor people from such knowledge and skills."

The World Bank’s "Poor People’s Knowledge: Promoting Intellectual Property in Developing Countries" is a collection of essays by researchers and practitioners covering the subject of knowledge development and intellectual property in the Base of the Pyramid. The book (available in PDF) is an informative and thought-provoking read. Today we touch on Chapter 2 "Handmade in India" by Maureen Liebl and Tirthankar Roy.

Handmade in India: Traditional Craft Skills in a Changing World

India’s 9.6 million craftsmen contribute an estimated $3.3 billion to the Indian economy. Crafts also provide part-time income to seasonal agricultural workers and women, a means for workers to remain in their villages rather than move to overcrowded cities, and act as archive for India’s rich cultural heritage. Handmade in India discusses the struggle of traditional crafts making in the face of more mechanized, cheaper alternatives and intellectual property problems.

"Artisans in India face the same IP problems as in other developing countries: cheap knockoffs, extensive copying among artisans, artisans who pass along (and sometimes sell) designs belonging to a client, and buyers who have a sample designed and produced in India, then manufactured in bulk somewhere else."

"Problems with enforcing ownership are particularly complex given what the artisans themselves accept as norms of behavior. Copying among artisans is a long-established tradition. Artists acquire their skills by copying."

The authors note that successful craftsmen are market-accepting individuals, who understand that societies evolve and that [outside of a museum] no craft can or should survive without a viable market. As entrepreneurs, craftsmen must seek new markets for their skills, but face four major shortcomings in doing so:

• Lack of knowledge on how to increase quality, productivity, and technical innovation.
• A constrained worldview that keeps them unaware of and an unable to access the new market opportunities available to them.
• A lack of working capital and access to credit. Even if a craftsman receives a large order, they do not have the upfront capital to fund the work and materials.
• A total lack of civic, professional, and social service infrastructures.

In the end, effective solutions to promoting and protecting poor peoples’ knowledge in India will need to account for Indian culture, community & family structures, the Indian caste system, and even deeply held beliefs about individualism: "Aesthetic forms are often thought of as springing from a kind of universal, divinely inspired subconscious." The authors suggest two types of solutions:

• Adapting traditional skills to new products for changing markets.
• Repositioning skills and products for upscale markets that appreciate and are willing to pay premiums for handcrafted quality and character.

On the flip side of a problem is always an opportunity. Organizations that offer effective methods to deal with the problems and solutions described in Handmade in India have the potential of opening up huge market opportunities in the Base of the Pyramid. Just remember that the promotion of innovation must be deeply ingrained in culture, a lesson not lost on us here at BRINQ.

Here’s a wonderful website and organization that is right up our alley, Invention at Play of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, part of the Smithsonian museum.

"The Lemelson Center is dedicated to exploring invention in history and encouraging inventive creativity in young people."

Invention at Play is both a website and a travelling exhibit, currently on display in Omaha, Nebraska and Wilmington, NC. More about the exhibit:

Invention at Play is a highly interactive, engaging and surprising traveling exhibit that focuses on the similarities between the way children and adults play and the creative processes used by innovators in science and technology. It departs from traditional representations of inventors as extraordinary geniuses who are “not like us‚” to celebrate the creative skills and processes that are familiar and accessible to all people. Visitors of all ages will experience various playful habits of mind that underlie invention.

The website includes biographies of historical and modern inventors and organizations, an interactive online play space to spark creativity, and articles and videos on the importance of play.

Invention at Play does a great job of explaining the importance of play to creativity and innovation, both in your personal life AND in your working life. This same playful spirit is at the heart of what we do here at BRINQ, so we couldn’t agree more!

“We are all too much inclined to walk through life with our eyes shut. There are things all around us, and right at our very feet, that we have never seen; because we have never really looked.”
-Alexander Graham Bell

The Ford Model T: Available in any color as long as it’s black.

In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Ford Model T, a "car for the common man", which both created and dominated the modern automobile market for the next 20 years, with more than 15 million units sold in its lifetime. Ford, however, failed to read the changes in perception of the market he had created, and continued to offer only one model to an evolving market looking for upgrades. The upstart General Motors capitalized on this shortcoming and surpassed Ford and the seemingly unbeatable Model T, by providing a ladder of car brands and upgrades. Some argue that Ford never really recovered from that misstep. This trap of not understanding and capturing the future value a venture enables we dubbed the “Model T Trap”*.

The “Model T Trap” is a critical issue for Base of the Pyramid (BOP) ventures, which by nature are enabling ventures, offering products and services “for the common man”. By enabling progress in the BOP, these ventures run the risk of lifting the customers they serve up and beyond the very services the ventures provide, potentially allowing others to capitalize on that future value, as GM did with Ford. Admittedly, falling into the trap itself is initially a sign of success both for the company and BOP development, but for ventures looking to attract continued investment to the BOP, they must have plans to capture the current AND future value their efforts enable.

This is even more critical if your goal is to incubate disruptive innovations in the Base of Pyramid. As Clayton Christensen details in "The Innovator’s Dilemma", before an innovation can disrupt its mainstream competitor, the innovation first incubates in an emerging market that values its attributes (attributes which are initially considered inferior by the mainstream). The innovation then follows an upward climb of improvements to eventually disrupt the mainstream market. That upward climb is a series of steps driven by customer demands in the emerging market. If you are not improving in step with your customer’s demands or you are unaware of the innovative ways in which your customers are using your offering, your unlikely to understand which aspects of your innovation are disruptive.

To avoid the trap, BOP ventures must find ways to embed themselves in their markets, capturing and leveraging local knowledge and shifts in perception, and to continue evolving their product and service offerings with their customers. Most critical is understanding how your customers are using your products and capitalizing on the new opportunities and innovations they are creating.

*The "Model T Trap" was presented at the 2004 meeting of the Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab, included in our recommendations for a consulting project to the Grameen Technology Center on the MTN villagePhone venture in Uganda.

Different problems require new innovations in India.

The Economic Times of India reports a number of "Bond-like" innovations:

• A bicycle that rides on both land and water.
• An electronic stick for the blind with sensors to detect water and the distance of objects.
• A long distance WiFi network to carry voice and internet access to rural villages (developed by Media Lab Asia.)
• An odor fighting ozone generating machine, to make bearable the burial traditions of one the world’s oldest religions.
• A film projector costing 1/10th the price of traditional projectors.

In an article published in October, Wired Magazine reports on even more innovations from India:

• Hewlett Packard’s Script Mail, an electronic pad for emailing in languages that are difficult to type in (you handwrite the messages, a dying art in the U.S.. )

“The motivation for developing this device was the recognition that English is not very widely used, and people want access [to e-mail] in their local languages, specifically those that are not [based] on the Roman script,” said Gita Gopal, associate director of HP Labs India.

• K-Yan developed the Compact Media Center which incorporates a TV, PC, and projector for use in large group learning.
• The International Institute of Information Technology has developed Shakti, English translation software. Director Rajeev Sangal describes why India is likely to develop better translation technology:

  "Western nations that usually pioneer research have no real motivation to be involved in language translation because they are chiefly monolingual countries. That’s why India is crucial here. Just about a billion people in this world speak English. The rest may need Shakti"