The chimera: Indian innovation

I recently talked to a venture capitalist who told me, with no little sadness, that India is a very difficult place to make money because even big Indian corporations would rather rig their own makeshift version of a product than spend the big bucks to buy the branded version.

Why are Indians addicted to the MacGyver? I can't be sure. My own childhood springs eternal with stories of making something out of nothing. When my parents refused to buy me a Barbie house, my sister and I made one. Yes, the bed was a former Scrabble box and the doors of the wardrobe didn't actually open, but our Barbie and Ken really rode it for gold. I'm not the only Indian kid with a story like this.

Take Pranav Mistry, an MIT genius who recently made waves with his new product, SixthSense (it's impossible to describe this apparatus, just Google it). When asked how he became so creative, Mistry gave an indirect answer. He was just a kid when Atari came up with their first video game. He cried for it, but his parents couldn't or wouldn't afford it. Instead, his dad made him a video game out of electronic components. Did it work? Yes. Was it bootleg? Undoubtedly.

Now the endlessly creative Mistry is the toast of the MIT Media Lab. People are crying for his inventions. "There's nothing we can't make," he says.

For years, Indians taped together knockoff versions of goods that we couldn't afford. But what does that mean in the 21st century? Take the example of the iPod Touch Mini. Never heard of it? Neither has Steve Jobs.

A few weeks I was with some friends when one of the guys got a call. He pulled out his phone to answer it, and jaws dropped. Eyeballs fogged with jealousy.

"What is that?" someone said, pointing to his phone. He showed us. It was the size of a business card, as thick as a slice of bread. It was sleek. It was shiny. It was cute. It was the silver bullet of phones. And it was a total knockoff. The closest that phone had ever been to an apple was when it was traveling next to his lunchbox.

One of my friends, who's been craving an iPod Touch for weeks, still hasn't bought one. A few days ago I asked her why.

She sighed sadly and answered, "I'm waiting for Apple to come out with the iPod Touch Mini."

Indians are endlessly cheap. The joke goes that we invented the zero because even 1 rupee was too high a price to pay. But our creativity is nearly divine. We created civilizations from dust, we could have built Rome in a day. (Bit it might've fallen down a week later.)

But all that is changing. We are on the brink, the lip, poised between necessity as the mother of invention and invention as the ancestor of real innovation. This may be a tough country to make money in now, but it won't be forever. How can someone spin straw into gold? That's the question all of us - me, Mistry, my friend the venture capitalist - want to answer. And this is the place to answer it.