Let us innovate in India to help make in India work

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That will be crucial given that none of the hardware innovations out of India have really been successful. There are a few that have evoked interest globally like Lechal, a smart shoe that initially developed for the blind, and Fin, a ring that let’s you control smart devices. Since none of the products are still available off the shelf, you can imagine the kind of challenges their creators must be facing. Another product that comes to mind is an over the top content streaming device called Lookup, which has in the three years since evolved into something far less innovative and exciting than they set out to create.

Somewhere I tend to believe the statistic that countries with a high penetration of computers tend to do well when it comes to hardware innovation. Sadly, India is still at the bottom of the pile when it comes to PC penetration. Of course, we have much more smartphones that most companies have people, but some like Ghosh are rightly worried that we are not using them gainfully and are more worried about being able to access entertainment or social networks without much hindrance.

But that does not mean Indian companies are unable to innovate. While there are hundreds of Indian-led startups across the world that are creating world class software and apps, there some hardware companies also in the offing.
I recently happened to meet Mahesh Lingareddy, Co-founder, vice-chairman and CEO of Soft Machines, a late stage pre-revenue silicon startup which now has over 250 employees and is valued at over $700 million.

Soft Machines’ success so far comes from its successful demonstration of its CPU technology based on a 28nm prototype System on Chip (SoC). “Our first silicons are aimed at smarphones, tablets and ultrabooks while the second one will be for more high-performance devices like desktops. We are also working on two more chips for servers, cloud and high performance computers,” he says, showing the first prototype silicon created by this Fabless company.

However, what could be more interesting for India is the fact that Lingareddy wants to leverage this ultra-efficient chip to create the foundation of a truly Indian product startup.

Interestingly, he has a team of over 50 people working on a stealth-mode project for kickstarting an “aggregated platform company” out of India. The plan is to raise $100 million to support internal R&D as well to fund various other product focused companies that could leverage the platform.

“We wanted to launch what would be the MediaTek of India a few years back. But then we realised there would be no one to sell it to India. That is when we started thinking if we can build a Samsung like company out of India and what it will take. We have taken this to the next level,” he says, without divulging details. He is clear that make in India should not be just about manufacturing but about making products also and we have to solve innovation infrastructure issues like access to risk capital and market maturity to grow in this space.

But that is still a distant dream till Indian startups start looking beyond the low hanging fruit offered by software innovations. They need to take a hard look at hardware for sustainable success.

(This story first appeared in Financial Express)