Some of the best brains of the country gathered at the Federation House in New Delhi on May 2. The occasion was the Department of Science and Technology (DST)-Lockheed Martin India Innovation Growth Programme (IIGP) 2013 closing ceremony. Thirty young innovators including engineers, scientists and researchers, were felicitated by Lockheed Martin and the Department of Science and Technology for their technological innovations, which can bring about sea changes in the lives of people.

Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission; Dr T. Ramasami, Secretary in the Department of Science and Technology, along with officials from Lockheed Martin, University of Texas and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), gave away the awards.

The event began with the welcome address by Dr A. Didar Singh, Secretary General of FICCI. Singh said, “FICCI is committed to expand the outreach of the programme to engage more innovators even in smaller cities and ensure that many more innovations are commercially successful.” Giving the keynote address, Ahluwalia emphasised on the need for creating the right ecosystem for injecting greater value for innovation. “Ability to innovate is scarce than starting a business and innovators don’t get a price unless marketed. There is the need for a whole range of venture capital. To risk failure, somebody needs to finance failure. Innovators should be encouraged.” He informed that for the first time the Twelfth Five Year Plan has a chapter on innovation.

The DST-Lockheed Martin IIGP initiated in the year 2007 aims at accelerating innovative Indian technologies into markets across the world. The programme is funded by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, and Lockheed Martin Corporation, and has been developed with the assistance of the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum, IC2 Institute at the University of Texas, and FICCI.

Of the 1,500 applications received from diverse fields such as clean energy, agriculture, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, robotics, etc this year; 50 were shortlisted in the initial phase. Faculty members from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which joined the programme this year, provided week-long training to the innovators on the principles of product commercialisation, readiness for market, business models, intellectual property (IP) rights, competitive positioning and mechanisms to earn revenue. Road shows were organised in 20 cities of the country including Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Goa, Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Chennai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Vadodara, Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Jaipur, Cochin, Guwahati, Ludhiana, Ranchi, Patna, and Indore with an aim to scout the best innovations from the country.

Among the winners, also was Aakash Sinha of Omnipresent Technologies who has awarded for conceptualising a light-weight unmanned drone; and Srinath Mallikarjunan of Unmanned Dynamics for developing the fault tolerant unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Sinha’s drone can be controlled from a distance of 15 km. It is an ultra-portable robotic unmanned drone which has high payload capacity, fixed-wing plane like structure made from balsa wood and fibreglass. It has a day-andnight surveillance camera with a gimbaled mount, remote controllable 10X optical zoom, GPS, accelerometer, gyro, compass, air pressure sensor, wind speed sensor and ultrasonic sensor; autopilot brushless DC motor engine and wireless control. Mallikarjunan’s UAV is low in cost and self-tuning. It can keep flying even with incredible damage, which the existing UAVs cannot endure without user intervention. The UAV has the latest in adaptive control called L1, which adapts to uncertainty while giving guaranteed flight performance.

T. Ramasami, who has been associated with the programme for the past few years, said that the programme has been an important growth promoter and a success. “Innovation is a process and has a purpose and the Indian innovation system combines both these goals.” He congratulated the winners of the programme and stressed on the need to bridge the gap between innovation and market and teaching the innovators commercialisation strategies so that they become self-reliant in promoting their innovations in the global market. Poverty, he said, is the greatest promoter of innovation and hoped that the IIGP will bring common gains.

Dr Ray O. Johnson, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Lockheed Martin Corporation, said: “Lockheed Martin is proud to be a sponsor of this exciting programme now in the seventh year,” and added, “The programme recognises the creative spirit of Indian inventors and trains them in business innovation, which leads to the commercialisation of products and services that help solve global problems and create jobs and wealth.” Sid Burback, Director, IC2 Institute at the University of Texas stated: “The candidates this year are highly competitive and skilled at showcasing their technologies.”

In his concluding remarks, Rajiv Sharma, Executive Director, Indo-US Science and Technology Forum, informed that more than 200 innovators and entrepreneurs have already been trained under the programme on how to pitch their ideas and impress potential investors.