With over 185 campers and some brilliant topic, the first WiCamp of the year 2010 and the first ever at IIT Kharagpur campus was an intellectual feast. Just to give you a sense of topics, how about- Rural Innovations; Remote Sensing; eWaste Management; Green Buildings; Green Products; Solid Oxide Fuel Cells; Managing Intellectual Property in India; Innovation at Apeejay Group; Agriculture Innovations; Physics, Information and Innovation; Green Buildings; and Visual Engineering; to name a few.

Apart from the students and faculty members coming in from various departments of IIT Kharagpur, there were a host of fans from corporate, startups, nearby colleges, government bodies and pretty much from all runs of life.

Further, through a JAM session, the team mustered over 110 ideas in a matter of 20 minutes. Now that’s called the wisdom of crowd.

Here’s the event highlight. The full event coverage is available at http://barcamp.org/WiCampKGP. So read, learn and see if you could implement a few of these ideas and good practices.

Regards | Pavan Soni

www.pavansoni.net

Prof. Anil Gupta on Rural Innovation and Collaboration

The WiCamp got its true spirit from the brilliant talk by Padma Shri Prof. Anil Gupta, the Executive Vice Chair of National Innovation Foundation and Coordinator of Honey Bee Network and SRISTI. He started his talk describing the Techpedia network where over 104,000 projects by 300,000 students have been shared for the purpose of connecting common problems to possible solutions. Further with a host of examples of rural innovations from India, he impressed upon the point of students engaging in small scale industries and applying their knowledge to bridge social divide. With a notion of inclusive innovation. Prof. Gupta opined that we need a network of inventors and entrepreneurs, those who can conceive great ideas and other who commercialize those. He urged campers to have an irreverent mindset and have a healthy debate on established theories.   

Deepanjan De on Green Energy

One of the several startups from the campus of IIT Kharagpur, Ecozen Solutions is an impressive attempt in addressing the sustainability issue leveraging technology. One of the members, Deepanjan drew inferences from related domains and argued that how critical is to give students and faculty time off to have their hobby projects. One of the inventions he was involved was in formation of Solid Oxide Fuel Cell where while addressing a mechanical problem, they ended up mixing cathode and electrolyte. An ingenuous solution for a waxing problem. This startup was a beneficiary of the Deferred Placement Program (DPP) at IIT Kharagpur where students are allowed to opt-out of placements to pursue their entrepreneurial flair and they can come back for regular placements post 2 years of graduation. A brilliant stoke.

Managing Intellctual Propery in India

The only IIT having a Law School at the campus- The Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law focuses on Intellectual Property and Technology Law. Here Dr. Raju from the department spoke about IP as a legal tool when firms set up to innovate. Depicting the history of Patenting and IPR Management, he highlighted the rather lack of awareness of the same in India. He also opined that rural innovations aren’t easily patentable owing to poor awareness levels and inadequate support. That’s where government and quasi- government bodies such as NIF plays a significant role in protecting and monetizing IP developed at the grassroots.

Remote Sensing and Green Innovations

One of the other distinctive features of the IIT Kharagpur campus is the Centre for Oceans, Rivers, Atmosphere and Land Sciences (CORAL). Dr. Behera depicted the evolution of Remote Sensing Technology in India and elsewhere and the high resultion images that one could obtain these days. This is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs in areas such as Tele Education, Tele Medicine and Agriculture. With considerable amount of information available at a significantly lower carbon footprint, the Remote Sensing technologies have a huge Green advantage and India has an advantaguous position owing to our highly advanced space program.

Agri Innovations in India

With an important share of India GDP coming in from the agriculture sector and it being responsible for generating over half of India employment, innovation in agriculture remain dormant. Dr. Padma’s research entail creating and maintaining a repository of agri-innovations in India and exploiting the same for commercial means. Might sound simple, but the task involves a tremendous effort in cataloguing the innovations, studying the IP evolution and portfolio building. She opined that similar to medical students, the engineering students too must be compulsorily having two years of service at rual India at the beginning of their career.   

Innovation at Apeejay Group

Subhasish Saha, the CTO of Apeejay Group gave a very insightful talk on Innovation in Corporate Context. He observed that innovation is creativity along with a risk taking ability. It always starts with an individual and can take many shapes. Needn’t always be breakthrough of some kind, but mostly is incremental and people driven. He sighted the turn around story at Oxford Book Store, one of the several businesses of the firm where by leveraging the lowest common denominator- People Power, the unit achieved a 20% top-line growth and huge brand value.

On Visual Engineering and Physics of Information

Two of most interesting presentations of the day came from Dr. Naresh Chandra from the Department of Physics and Meteorology and Kanav Hasija from the institute. Dr. Chandra drew a fantastic parallel between Classical and Quantum Physics and Information stating the deep linkage. Drawing on the principles of information propogation and notation, he took audience to a different plane altogether. And the final talk was by Kanav who spoke about Visual Engineering as a way of managing machines in our lives and hearts by leveraging Convertible Technologies.