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A helping hand for Indian innovation Business sense

Sometimes an acronym can do double duty: NI, is of course shorthand for National Instruments, the Austin, Texas-based global leader in virtual instrumentation. But when the company recently launched a not-for-profit initiative called Planet NI, it had a different phrase in mind: Nurturing Innovation.

In Bangalore this week to kick off the programme was NI’s vice-president (sales) for Asia, Victor Mieres - and in a brief chat at the Bangalore headquarters of NI Systems (India) at Belandur, he explained how the two NIs might come together in a happy synergy of interests.

LabView, NI’s flagship product, now in its eighth avatar, has long been a popular tool to translate engineering design ideas into products: Built around a personal computer, LabView, allows engineers to mix ’n match sensors and measurement modules to create a “virtual instrument” on a test bench, often within hours — and with little training.

It is popular with students as well — and many Indian engineering colleges and quite a few IITs have set up LabView labs to allow graduate students to create term-end project set-ups with minimum hassle.

The challenge, says Mr Mieres, is that in India, there is so much talent out there; but many modestly funded players — start ups incubated in academia; other small enterprises — cannot afford the asking price for a licensed LabView, even while sorely needing its special prototyping features to translate their ideas into hardware.

In recent weeks, students of Bangalore’s RV Engineering College created a prototype for a hybrid car that ran on electricity or bio-diesel. They were able to design and test their car using LabView — and also got valuable help from Robert Bosch, the car instrumentation specialists, as well as from the makers of Reva, the Indian electric car.

“There are dozens of such great ideas out there,” adds Jayram Pillai, Managing Director, NI Systems, “Planet NI (among other things) is about reaching out to them, with a helping hand.”

How will NI do that?

They still figuring out ways — but when Victor leaves for home, he would have put in place the mechanism that will empower NI’s India’s operation substantial freedom to nurture innovation, every which way it can: special pricing; company manpower to help with deploying NI tools and writing software to run them; and in rare cases, even free use of LabView and other tools.

Indian enterprises who have been extended a helping hand in the past — like Captronics and Apna Technologies (both Bangalore-based) and Optimized Solutions ( Ahmedabad) — are today respected system integrators with thriving businesses.

Who’s next? Where will the next compelling idea emerge? No one knows. But at NI they’re saying, if the shove needed to kickstart your next big idea, is an NI tool, we’ll make IT happen for you.

ANAND PARTHASARATHY

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