NASSCOM encourages innovation landscape in India with the announcement of 7th Innovation Award Winners 2011

In its effort to encourage the innovation landscape in India, NASSCOM today announced the winners of the Innovation Awards 2011. From the 20 shortlisted companies, the final 8 winners will be felicitated by H’onoble Minister of Commerce and Industry, Anand Sharma for their outstanding contribution to the Indian IT-BPO sector at the forthcoming NASSCOM India Leadership Forum 2011 on 8^th Feb 2011.

The awards now in its 7^th year recognize organizations that have made innovation a part of their DNA and developed extraordinary and pioneering products and services. AT Kearney was the process partner for this year’s awards.

Congratulating the Innovation Awards winners, Mr. Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM said- “Innovation and transformation are the buzzwords for growth in the post recession world to ensure risk averse and stable business models. Innovation is expected to be a significant driver of the decade, especially for the Indian IT-BPO industry, which is currently exploring new business and delivery models, as well as products and services to remain competitive. In such a scenario it becomes mandatory for us to develop an ecosystem which is conducive for innovation. NASSCOM Innovation Awards is an effort to provide a platform for innovators to showcase their breakthrough technology ideas and it is encouraging to see the bar raised every year.

This year saw the addition of two new special categories- Promising New Technology and Social Technology for energy efficiency. The winners were selected after a rigorous two round process by an esteemed panel of judges comprising of industry luminaries, academicians and analysts and were chosen across diverse verticals including Telecom, Manufacturing, BSFI, healthcare, utilities etc.The entries were shortlisted on the basis of the innovation of technology, scalability of the model and number of patents filed by the applicant company. The announcement of the Innovation Awards 2011 is soon to be followed by a comprehensive report by NASSCOM in collaboration of its knowledge partner A.T Kearny on the innovation landscape in India.

The award category includes:

New Technology Advancement

This category includes the creation of ‘new to the world’ or ‘new to the market’ technology.

Market facing Innovation – Business Model & business process

This category includes IT services and products that have enabled customer/customers to realize value by transforming their clients’ business models, business processes or other structural change such as realignment of their IT Architecture.

Process Innovation

This category includes innovations made by an IT-BPO firm to its own business processes, business models, business inputs (talent acquisition and retention, raising capital, strategic acquisitions etc), go to market strategies, delivery models, methodologies etc to realize significant value to itself. Each of the above three categories will have one winner in the Large and Medium Category

About the winners

Winner- Elitecore Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Elitecore Technologies chose the Unified Threat Management security products arena to build its innovation, recognising the potential of the market which is poised to grow to USD 3.2 billion by 2013. The solution facilitates identification of behavior patterns to denote misuse, unauthorised intrusions, or malicious attacks from inside or outside the enterprise.

Runner- up: Tejas Networks Ltd.

Tejas Networks was inspired by the high growth global optical hardware market—estimated to reach USD 16 billion over the next 3-4 years—to launch its innovation, the TJI 1600C. The offering is a POTP (Packet Optical Transport Platform) unit that can be deployed as a 100 percent TDM box today and can be smoothly migrated to 100 percent data in the future.

Special Category- KPIT Cummins

KPIT’s developed an Intelligent, plug-in hybrid solution Revolo allows existing vehicles running on conventional fossil fuels to be converted to fuel efficient hybrid vehicles within 4-6 hours.

Process Category: Market Facing Innovation

Winner: LatticeBridge Infotech Pvt. Limited

Lattice Bridge Infotech created a solution using Automatic Speech Recognition technology to identify various Indian languages and dialects for customer care solutions. The company did so to avail the opportunity thrown up by the domestic BPO market, especially verticals such as Telecom and BFSI that need multiple language customer service agents.

Runner- up: MobME Wireless Solutions (P) Ltd

MobME created a mGovernance service delivery platform which can integrate services from all 14 telecom operators and integrates services like SMS, Voice, MMS,3G and Location Based Services into a single API. The technology allows any govt. department to directly incorporate any service into this SDP and thus enable the delivery of a government service to citizens across operator.

Special Category- Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments developed a cost effective off-grid lighting solutions for rural electrification - LED lanterns and solar charging stations. Its key technological innovations to facilitate the project includes LED driver package customized so as to enable low cost manufacturing while achieving high conversion efficiency and MSP430 based DC2DC converter to maximize energy received from solar panels.

Process Category: Process Innovation

Winner: GENPACT

Genpact launched an improved version of existing BPM suites, by developing a Smart Enterprise Process Management Solution (SEP) for clients to assess their processes. The company created a scientifically rigorous methodology for managing business processes and measuring impact on metrics such as cash flows and working capital.

Runner- up: Mahindra Engineering Service

Mahindra Engineering Service, innovated to speed up the simulation time in the automobile design validation process, from 16 hours to 10 minutes! Through the new process and analysis methodology, the validation time has been scaled down by 80 percent. The process improvement has also reduced manual intervention.