Indian Innovators (21 page)

From the very beginning, our focus was on quality and we matched the international standards, if not bettered them. We won tenders against tough competition from top international companies such as the Israeli company, Blue Bird Auro and the German company, Microdrone.

A lot of media coverage followed. We were first featured on CNBC Young Turks in 2008. In 2010,
India Today
placed us among the Top 20 Innovators Changing Lives. We were on Times Now Amazing Indians in 2011. The CNN-IBN Young Leader Award was conferred on us in 2012. CNBC Young Turks covered us again in 2013.”

In 2012, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) organized a rally at Azad Maidan in Mumbai to protest against the riots in Assam. A huge crowd was to gather and the Mumbai Police was under severe pressure to ensure that no untoward incident took place. They decided to deploy Netra for surveillance, making India the first country to use a UAV for crowd management.

Since then, the Ahmedabad city administration has shown great enthusiasm for obtaining Netra for crowd and traffic management, and it may soon become the first city in the world to do so.

InJune 2013, after the devastating floods and landslides in Uttarakhand, the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) called in Netra UAVs to help with the rescue operations.

“We responded by deploying four Netra UAVs within 24 hours. Despite the rough terrain and harsh weather, Netra did a superb job by locating 190 trapped survivors. It was a very difficult mission. It was a great responsibility and we are extremely proud that our baby – Netra – could help save so many valuable lives. This also opened the door for Netra to be used for another purpose – disaster management. We are now conducting training at our facility in Mumbai for organizations associated with disaster management.”

Netra is fabricated from carbon fiber composites and weighs just 1.5 kg. It is equipped with a high-resolution daylight camera as well as a thermal camera for night vision. The cameras have a 10X optical zoom with pan and tilt control. The in-flight video can be transmitted live or be recorded on-board for analysis later. The best part of Netra is its image processing software that allows locking a particular image, which can then be used to track a particular target. Inbuilt image stabilization and defogging capabilities enable the device to operate in turbulent winds and hazy conditions. The device can monitor ground action up to a distance of 5 kilometers and zoom to focus on the minutest of details.

“The UAV is practically failsafe. If it is running low on battery or loses communication with the base station, it has the capability to return to the base station on its own. It is invisible to most of the commonly used radars and is practically noiseless.

Unlike the conventional helicopter which has only one rotor, Netra UAV employs quad-rotors, that is, four smaller rotors instead of one bigger rotor. This gives more stability to the UAV during flight. It also improves control and ensures that the UAV is able to fly even if a particular rotor fails for some reason.

The user interface is very simple and intuitive. Anybody can be trained to use Netra in just a few sessions. The position of the UAV is tracked and displayed on a map on the screen in real time and flight plan adjustment can be as simple as ‘point and click’. Also, the user is automatically prompted for all the checklists, before and during the flight, to ensure that nothing is amiss.

Each Netra UAV costs several tens of lakhs, but is still much cheaper and more functional than several other UAVs available in the international market.”

Ankit shares the company’s future plans. “After establishing ourselves in India, we are looking at international expansion and have already identified distributors in New Zealand and Australia. Distributors in other geographical territories are also being approached. We are also working on enhancing the battery life, range and other capabilities of the UAV to make it even more attractive to potential buyers.

It has been an extremely difficult yet satisfying journey. Beginning with a small seed capital arranged from friends, family members and SINE, we have now crossed half-a- million dollars in sales and would be able to cross a million dollars in the current financial year. We expect to grow even faster in the coming years, as we expand our product portfolio and professional investors come onboard.”

Epilogue

As can be observed from these stories, innovation and entrepreneurship are connected. Quoting the management guru Peter Drucker, “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. Innovation is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”

As the inventor of a product, you are the best judge of its potential. There will be many naysayers who will not understand what your product is about, but the best way to prove them wrong is to sell it yourself. You may not have sold a toothpick before, but as they say – there is always a first time. You will learn the art like many others in this book did. You can learn from their mistakes, but do not be afraid to make your own.

The set of stories presented here give a good overview of the scope and scale of innovation occurring in Indian academic and industrial circles. However, for every person presented in the book, there are several others whose work still needs to be talked about. It would be my constant effort to bring out many more such stories.

I salute each and every one of those whose work has fetched and will continue to fetch glory to the country. Their vision will help change the perception of India as a country with insignificant technological output.

Appendix I Patent and Prosper

By Mrinmayee Bhushan

The motivation to write this article comes from my very own experience with patents – the good, the bad and the ugly.

I am a first-generation entrepreneur and had little experience with product development and idea protection when I started. I learned it all by getting my fingers burned.

After spending loads of hard-earned money toward the fee of patent attorneys in India and the US, I ended up drafting, prosecuting and receiving the grant of four patents on my own. I also had to abandon a very valuable US patent after a very costly, long-drawn prosecution of a patent application that was badly botched up by the patent attorneys.

I hope my experiences will help fellow innovators fumble a little less while patenting their innovations.

What is a patent, and why bother getting one?

A patent is a form of intellectual property, which consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time, in exchange for public disclosure of the invention. That is, a patent restricts others from making direct commercial use of the invention, but this restriction applies only for a limited period of time.

Patentability

The patentability of your innovation needs to be established at the earliest. Though patent laws and practices vary from one country to another, there are three main criteria on which an innovation is said to be patentable subject matter:

I
t is a novelty.


 


I
t is non-obvious.


 


I
t has industrial applicability/utility.


 

An innovator working in a bootstrapping model can do an initial patentability search himself by searching patent databases, such as the US Patent office (USPTO) database, consisting of patent applications and already granted patents. The European Patent Office database (espacenet), databases of relevant scientific publications and other electronic databases such as Google Scholar can be good resources as well.

This initial scrutiny helps the innovator in estimating the patentability of the subject matter before spending anything on a patent agent. This effort, in turn, results in minimal search charges by the attorney.

Patent Drafting

A provisional or complete specification should be filed before publishing any article or news item in the public domain.

Usually, the patent is drafted meticulously by a competent patent agent in consultation with the innovator. The layout of a patent application typically consists of Abstract, Prior art, Technical details/drawings, Examples, Summary and Claims.

If an innovator decides to draft and prosecute his patent application, then studying different types of patent applications in the relevant subject matter helps to understand the nuances of the patenting system. Studying the USPTO patent drafting rules is particularly useful, because these are stricter than rules in other patent offices.

Innovator’s Dilemma

Drafting patent claims is an art. The language of the claims is of critical importance, because the set of claims defines the scope of protection sought by the patent application. However, though the patent application is examined on the basis of what is “claimed”, the body of complete specification is extremely important. The complete specification should sufficiently describe the subject matter for a person skilled in the art (relevant field) to understand it. During the prosecution of the patent application, the applicant is allowed to edit/change/ cancel or add new patent claims, only if it is supported by the complete specification. Any claim without the support of the specification is treated as “new subject matter” and is not allowed to be included.

This is the “not too much, not too little” dilemma for an innovator.

The Mother of the Invention

Every innovator must remember the fact that they are the mother of their invention. If it is truly novel, no one in this world understands the subject matter of your innovation as you do.

The innovator must be totally involved when the patent agent is drafting the patent application. You may not be conversant with legal language used in the patent application. However, do not simply send a write-up of the subject matter to the patent agent and expect him to draft a competitive patent specification and claims. It is highly advisable to arrange multiple meetings with the agent during the process. During the very first meeting, howsoever complicated a technology one is dealing with, the innovator should explain the subject matter to the patent agent in layman’s language, without using too much scientific jargon. (You can practice this by explaining your technology to a school-going child.)

This may sound very ridiculous, but an esteemed patent agent and a good friend practicing in the USPTO has taught me this technique of initially oversimplifying the subject matter. This helps the patent agent first understand the “crux of the matter” and then its intricacies.

At the time of drafting the very first provisional specification, the innovator may not have plans or resources to take it to the global level. However, if the technology has global potential, the specifications (provisional or complete) should be drafted according to international standards.

It is advisable to apply internationally through the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). PCT’s international search for patentability and written opinion and the international patent examination report form the basis for applying for patents in various countries separately. It helps the innovator in estimating the patentability of the innovation, before spending funds on examination by patent offices of individual countries. The patenting process is very time-sensitive. The innovator needs to adhere to the timeframes very stringently. The websites of Indian Patent Office and the WIPO PCT Time Limit Calculator are resources to help innovators meet these deadlines.

Though patent agents are aware of the time limits of every stage of patenting, the innovator is strongly advised to be involved in the process by studying and understanding patent laws and rules. It is extremely important for those innovators who are working in a bootstrapping model.

If relevant to your innovations, do add other forms of intellectual property such as trademarks and copyrights to make your patent basket more valuable.

In a nutshell

If you are ready to take the extra effort of studying patent laws and want to prosecute your own patents, without hiring the services of professionals, here’s how to go about it:

As mentioned earlier, study other patent applications and patent laws extensively.


 


Apply internationally through PCT as an individual, which results in reduction of various fees.


 


You do not need a patent agent to apply to PCT.


 


In addition, some countries like the US, the UK, Australia and Canada allow individual applicants to prosecute their own applications.


 


Reduce the risk by consulting a friendly patent agent as necessary, instead of authorizing him to act on your behalf.


 


After the patent is granted, do not assign it to your own company, until you license out or sell the technology. The annual patent fees are very low for an individual, so keep the patent assigned to an individual (innovator).


 

The Ministry for Small and Medium Enterprises (Government of India) provides patent reimbursement to SMEs to encourage patenting (
25,000 for Indian patents and
200,000 for international patents). However, it can be more expensive for an innovator or his start-up company to maintain the patents, because the annual maintenance fees are much higher for companies, as compared to individuals.

Some useful links

http://www.ipindia.nic.in/

http://www.wipo.int/pct/en/calculator/pct-calculator.html

http://www.uspto.gov/

http://www.epo.org/searching/free/espacenet.html

Note:
These suggestions are especially useful for individual innovators pursuing innovation with very limited resources. They may not necessarily be the best practices applicable to everybody and in all situations. In any case, it is definitely better for innovators to know the patenting process, even if they can afford the steep patenting fee.