Challenging the status quo ….

At Cornell, I had the opportunity to study under Prof Stuart Hart, co-author with Prof CK Prahland on the orginal paper – Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Among all the courses I took as part of my MBA, the Sustainable Enterprise Course taught by Prof Hart, connected with me the most not just because he is a wonderful teacher but also because of his passion and content of the course. Being a product engineer at Cisco in my previous life, I had often wondered how products that were priced so high be able to meet the dream of bringing the internet within the reach of every child on every part of the planet. Internet has truly allowed more people to participate in a global economy. However, its reach is not still happening at the pace at which it should happen and thats primarily because of the cost of broadband being so high. Technology companies in the west have often built products and priced them based on what was affordable to the local customers. Now the same products are being pushed in the Indian market. Because of lack of choice, the Indian telecom players have to make huge investments, and infact they have been quite aggressively making the investments on equipment especially in the mobile space. However, when it comes to broadband, the costs are still high, and the customer adoption is slow. The PC costs have also not come down enough, so the progress to reach out to every town and village has been really slow.
The Tenet group at IIT chennai has been trying to address this problem by creating an ecosystem of product companies, services companies that can leverage the broadband, and applications that will help drive the adoption. There are several such initiatives happening across India. What I percieve the lack of is the full-fledged commercialization strategies as well as serious venture capital funding to really take these experiments/technologies to the next level.
Going back to Prof Hart’s book, ‘Capitalism at the Crossroads’, where he discusses the challenges faced by the current model of capitalism, and why there has been such a backlash against it, it becomes much more important for us to focus and invest more in emerging technologies which will truly help us to design products suited for the local market.

The mobile phone makers – Nokia, Motorola – have seen the opportunities that become available especially in volumes as they introduce the more low end phones. Its time the other MNCs having their local engineering operations start looking at products for the local market which will infact benefit the global market.

This is just the precussor to more writing I plan to have on this topic. More in the the coming weeks/months.