July 8th, 2006 Prasad Sangameshwaran
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Last week I was speaking to a senior executive from Wipro, a top-notch, information technology services company in India. I couldn’t help but ask him, despite their IT prowess, why don’t Indian companies have enough patents? Despite the fact that the top 10 patent holders across the world are IT companies.
I am surely not the first one who’s asked him this question. The ease with which he tackled that question is proof. But this time it was not a stock reply that business executives often give journalists. The Wipro executive, a very senior person, told me his company had filed for 50 patents last year. But none of them are owned by the company. These patents are filed along with clients.
In the years ahead, “filed-but-not-owned” could have repercussions, particularly as the number of patents against your name has a bearing on critical areas like brand valuation and enhancing shareholder value.
Is it the Indian mindset. Do we lack confidence in our ideas and think they are not worthy of patents? Almost 18,000 patents based on Indian medicinal plants were granted in US/EU in the 2-3yrs. Most certainly, few of them would have been owned by companies based out of India. Remember the Neem fiasco and how our country had to drag itself out of the mess.
The neem saga may soon happen to yoga. A brand valuation expert told me that Yoga is a $20 billion opportunity in the US and Indian companies have none of it. Forget abroad. Even in India, Indian businesses are blind to the Yoga opportunity. In Hypercity, Mumbai’s biggest hypermarket, Yoga mats have that familiar tag, “made in China”. Again, Curry is hot and a billion dollar industry in England. But how many Indian brands have made a business opportunity out of it?
This is no patriotic babble, but as India becomes the world’s backoffice for even filing patents (legal paperwork is cheaper, if outsourced to countries like India), we need to sit up and recognise that ideas, and the ownership of them, will take us to the big league. As my colleague, Srini puts it, “to be a superpower you need softpower”. Ideas are softpower packed with a double-punch.
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July 8th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
The IT success story in India is about “processes” and not “intellect”.
Indian IT companies have even managed to convert product development into a service labeling it as “Outsourced Product Development”.
Developing IPRs and software products is more than just “coding it”. It needs true innovation and the ability to take risks.
How many successful international IT products have come out of India? Anyone?
July 10th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
from when did hypercity become Mumbai’s largest mall? and in the first place, is it a mall, its a hypermarket. got to get your facts right, prasad
July 11th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
a very pertinent point….in fact as far as i see, the so called IT superpower that India has is in the end not much more than the classical BPO…we just rent out our minds but what the mind creates, we dont own and yr right, we are yet to understand the repurcussions….