Helping Indian Innovation Succeed

Way back in 2002, an Indian non-profit organization named Simputer Trust created by 7 scientists and engineers created the eponymous Simputer. It stood for “simple, inexpensive and multilingual people's computer”.

 

It included very-advanced-for-the-time features. Text-to-speech software. Linux operating system. Size of the Palm Pilot. A touch sensitive screen! Operable via a stylus. Even a simple handwriting recognition software. A serial port. USB connections. Both a color and a black and white (greyscale) version.

 

The creators hoped it would enable even the poor to get familiar with computers, and eventually, get onto the still emerging-in-India Internet. Agricultural and fertilizer info was one obvious use. The market could have been not just the poor - sales teams on the move, insurance agents on the go could have stored content on it (Remember, laptops were very rare and expensive; the smartphone and the tablet had not yet been invented).

 

Sadly, it died a premature death. Why? Rahul Matthan analyses the reasons, not just out of academic interest but also as a lesson for how we, as a country, should handle the next innovative, first of its kind product invented in India.

 

Matthan, like most of us, assumed the Simputer failed because it was way ahead of its time.

“With the benefit of hindsight, I think I was being too kind.”

But then he noticed another Indian innovation – the electric car, Reva.

“By the late 2000s, with roughly 3,000 to 4,000 units on the road across more than 24 countries, was the most-sold electric vehicle on the planet — well before Tesla made EVs desirable.”

Reva, like the Simputer, sadly became a footnote in history.

 

These examples shatter the myth that Indians can’t invent new products.

“What we seem to lack is the ability to take those ideas and turn them into commercial successes.”

 

All Simputer needed to attain critical mass and profitability was ₹50 crore. Via sales, not as an investment or a loan. A government order for just 50,000 units would have achieved that. But such an order never came, despite the potential and benefits of taking the computer (and the dial-up Internet) to the villages.

 

Did that sound like government subsidizing or encouraging a company/industry? Yes, it is that. But the US does this all the time – when the semiconductor chip was invented, guess where the largest orders came from? The US military, because the US government was willing to bet that such chips would give a technological edge to the military. Such huge and guaranteed orders ensured the then fledgling chip industry survived until it achieved scale and success via other consumers also. Similarly, NASA contracts kept SpaceX alive and kicking, until it came with breathtakingly new and different space tech. The Chinese government does the same in more and more industries. So, nothing new is being suggested.

 

Look at Jio, says Matthan. It invested $20 billion to roll out 4G across the country, then offered four months of service free to win 400 million subscribers. At a loss, yes, but Reliance was playing the long game. More Indians came to the Net for the first time, data consumption exploded, new apps came up to cater to this huge user base of the (Indian) Internet, Aadhar based systems went to the smartphone… you see the enormous benefits to the country.

 

All this shows that for a new, first of its kind innovation to succeed, it needs (1) initial subsidies and guaranteed orders, (2) patience to absorb losses for the first few years, (3) and courage to believe in something that the world doesn’t yet understand, let alone believe in.

“We have all three, but what we have refused to do is deploy them well.”

It is time we changed that mindset. And if governments need to be part of this process, well, both the US and China show it is often worth the risk.

“The next Simputer has already been invented. We need to find it, nurture it, and feed it the capital it needs to become everything the Simputer could not be.”

Amen to that.