NASSCOM announces winners of ‘innovation in IT awards’ 2007

From the 21 companies short listed, eight winners will be felicitated and recognised for their outstanding contribution to the Indian IT sector at the forthcoming NASSCOM 2008 India Leadership Forum, scheduled in Mumbai from 13 to 15h February 2008. 

With innovation having been widely accepted as a key strategic lever for sustaining competitiveness and driving growth, the NASSCOM Innovation in IT Awards aims to recognise those companies that have instilled innovation into existing knowledge and have come up with new ideas, products, processes or technologies that enable the business to achieve greater and better margins plough back into the business.

The recently released report by NASSCOM and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Innovation Report 2007, benchmarks the Indian innovation ecosystem with leading innovation ecosystems around the world, and outlines recommendations for developing India's innovation ecosystem for the country. According to the report focusing on innovation will also allow the Indian IT sector to tap additional revenue streams worth US$ 50 billion by 2012 and 'NASSCOM's Innovation Awards' is a key component of towards realizing this opportunity.

The key focus for the NASSCOM Innovation Forum has been to build innovation as the key differentiator for the Indian IT and BPO industry. The award is now in the third year of existence.
 
''The next wave of growth for the Indian IT industry will be innovation-led and hence possessing an innovation capability will be sine qua non for Indian IT firms, regardless of their size,'' said Som Mittal, president, NASSCOM.
 
''Towards achieving this objective, NASSCOM had constituted the Innovation in IT awards as a platform for firms to showcase their innovations. 2007 marks the fourth edition of the awards and in this edition we have introduced a special focus on start-ups. Not only this, to further provide impetus to talented innovators, NASSCOM recently announced the NASSCOM–ICICI Knowledge Park Innovation Fund (NIIF) a first of its kind initiative, to provide seed stage investments in order to promote intellectual property-driven innovations in emerging technologies. NASSCOM is deeply committed to promoting innovation in the Indian IT industry and the development of an Indian innovation ecosystem'' he added. (See: Nasscom sets up innovation fund) 
 
The Indian IT-BPO industries have achieved significant maturity and consolidation over the past few years and are now set for their next phase of evolution and momentum. Having explored various dimensions for achieving global leadership and building competitive advantage through rightly skilled, industry-relevant, specialized manpower, robust infrastructure and a favourable regulatory environment, the IT-BPO industry is on the hunt for a new success routes.

Innovation has been identified as the key imperative for the growth of the Indian IT-BPO industry that will enable India to sustain its lead in the world markets. The NASSCOM-McKinsey Study 2005 makes a strong case for innovation, suggesting that the Indian IT-BPO sector can generate over $10-15 billion of additional revenues by 2010 - over and above its $60 billion export target - provided it makes innovation its chief growth catalyst. NASSCOM & BCG report says innovation will also allow the Indian IT sector to tap additional revenue streams worth $50 billion by 2012.
 
In line with this, the key focus for the NASSCOM Innovation Forum has been to foster innovation as the key differentiator for the Indian IT and BPO industry. The broad award categories for 2007 include Market Facing Innovation, Process Innovation and Input Innovation for both emerging companies and large and MNC companies. 

• Comat Technologies (P) Ltd- Comat's Rural Business Centers which serves over 35,000 rural customers a day. 
  
• Financial Technologies India Ltd- for DOME™ (Distributed Order Matching Engine) an integrated matching engine for commodities as well as equities providing Trading, Surveillance, real time pre trade Risk Management and Clearing and Settlement a highly scalable solution which can scale up based on increasing load demands. 
  
• Mango Technologies Pvt Ltd- for Application framework for low-cost terminal devices like mobile phones, media players etc. This is the lowest memory footprint solution in its segment, with differentiating features for terminal devices.
  
• MediaLab Asia- for Sanyog a Multilingual (English, Hindi & Bengali) augmentative Communication System for the Speech Impaired and Children affected with Neuro Motor Disorders such as Cerebral Palsy. 
  
• Mistral Solutions Pvt Ltd- for Market facing Innovation for V8TS, an extremely powerful dual sub-system product consisting of digital signal processing and control processing on a single 6UVME platform
  
• Texas Instrument for Market facing Innovation for LoCosto the first single chip solution for wireless handsets.

Process Innovation Winners
(Process innovations are innovations related to how different processes are managed within a firm to increase the firms' competitiveness.)

• Mindtree Consulting- for Knowledge Management ecosystem a holistic taking into view the entire lifecycle view of knowledge including knowledge creation and innovation, collaboration and knowledge sharing, and reuse. 

Input Innovation Winners
(Input innovations are innovations related to inputs which are brought into a firm. Examples of typical inputs into a firm would include talent, capital and technology)

• MeritTrac Solutions Pvt Ltd- for online assessment hubs MAZ provide an ideal testing ambience with end-to-end recruitment processing from registrations to offer rollout.