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25of theBEST THE ECONOMIC TIMES NEW DELHI FRIDAY 30 JANUARY 2009
The best things in life are for free—and need to be kept that based on his research.The project proposed to make
METHODOLOGY way.Tim Berners-Lee,physicist and Oxford University
graduate,believed in it.The man who invented the World
Wide Web (WWW) in 1989-90 could easily have become a
hypertext documents freely available to users everywhere.
Today,if we are able to raid the internet’s bounties for
everything from the history of Machu Picchu to Nehru’s
OF THE CEO POLL trillionaire,had he decided to monetise his invention.
Today,thanks to him,millions of users worldwide post and
famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’,it is because of the point and
click system Berners-Lee and his associates pioneered.One
access multimedia data on the internet,adding to the can view WWW pages that may contain text,images,
steadily growing mountain of casual,business, videos,multimedia and navigate between them using
informative,academic and entertainment-related content hyperlinks.
WORLD WIDE online.Despite its popularity,the WWW (or the Web) is not No one currently enjoys proprietary status of the WWW.
an easy concept to understand.Indeed,many consider it Voluntary groups like W3C (WWW consortium led by Tim
WEB synonymous with the Internet.But as experts say,“ WWW is Berners-Lee himself),ICANN and Internet Governance
a subset of the internet.However,the internet owes its Forum under the UN ensure that the WWW remains like
massive popularity to the Web!”In 1989,Berners-Lee,then the commons in medieval England—to be shared and
working with CERN (the Geneva-based European Particle maintained by all.The Web now has over 1.4 billion users
Physics Laboratory),proposed a global hypertext project worldwide and this number is growing fast.
T
o select 25 ideas from a million
wasn't easy. ET first selected MICRO
25 ideas which, according to CHIPS
editorial judgement, had gone
beyond being mere business ideas and
pushed human minds to new levels.
Needless to say, ideas which have MOBILE GOOGLE
played vital roles in shaping our lives
got into the top 25 list. The 25-Ideas PHONES SEARCH
list was then presented to 50 top When Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive considered It’s said that the ultimate success of a product lies in its brand name
chairmen/managing directors and to be the inventor of the practical portable mobile handset, made the becoming a verb. Google is one such brand. Imagine carrying the
CEOs of leading Indian companies to first call on a handheld on April 3, 1973, little did he foresee that the world’s knowledge in the brain and giving out near-results whenever
rank each idea as per three product would shrink the world and connect billions across countries someone pops a question. The web search engine has managed to do
parameters, namely and continents. just that, and in the process, made hard-copy monoliths like the
About 35 years later, over 60% of the world’s 6.6 billion people own a Encyclopaedia Britannica run out of business. Google began as a
Originality
mobile handset, while 80% have access to one. The mobile phone dissertation project in January 1996 by Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at
Impact on Stakeholders outsells every other product in the world, including bicycles, television Stanford. It later evolved as one of the most popular inventions on the
Relevance Over Time.
sets and even wristwatches. India, the world’s fastest growing telecom internet. Page was soon joined by his mate, Sergey Brin, on the thesis.
market with over 10 million new mobile users being added every Now Googling is officially listed as a verb in the Oxford and Merriam
ORIGINALITY month, enters 2009 with just under 350 million customers and is likely Perhaps no other idea has had the kind of impact that Websters Collegiate dictionaries.
to exit the year with a cellular subscriber base of 460 million. the small, embedded inside devices, silently working
To understand if the idea was merely chip has had on people’s lives. It’s ubiquitous-in
an upgrade of an existing thought or everything from computers, cars, cellphones, coffee-
truly singular in its concept at the time makers, space shuttles, smart toasters, washing
when it was launched. machines, and so on. Not surprisingly, the global
chip market is over $200 billion a year and the market
IMPACT ON STAKEHOLDERS for all the products that use a chip is well over a
By stakeholders we mean not just trillion dollars!
those whose idea it was but the larger Chips perform various tasks by design. Meaning that
universe of consumers, employees and some are more complex than others. The most
sophisticated chip is a microprocessor, whose
even competition. How successful was
transistors can execute hundreds of millions of
the idea in touching and changing the instructions per second.
lives of these stakeholders? Did this These chips or integrated circuits as they were called
happen immediately or over time? Was PLASTIC when first developed, were invented by Jack Kilby of HUMAN
it able to become a part of people's MONEY Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce who later INSULIN
habits/lifestyle? founded Intel, the world’s largest chip-maker. Kilby
Nothing has come to represent cash the way credit cards have. The idea recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated If there is one disease Indians are most wary about, it is Diabetes, a
RELEVANCE OVER TIME of using a card to make purchases was first drawn up by Edward circuit in July 1958 and successfully demonstrated the medical condition where the human body cannot produce or use
Bellamy in 1887 in his novel Looking Backward and its sequel Equality. first working integrated circuit on September 12, insulin properly. Over centuries, the disease had resulted in deaths of
There are certain ideas whose impact The US was the first country to launch it in the early 1900s, although millions worldwide.
may not have been immediate but they 1958. He won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his
the usage was at the time restricted to being ‘unorganised’. part of the invention of the chip. Noyce came up with So when Dr Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best first
gradually entered people's lives over It was Diners Club International, the first independent credit card made insulin from an animal pancreatic extract in 1922, it came as a
his own idea of the chip, six months after Kilby.
time. Conversely, there are some ideas company in the world and American Express, which changed the way blessing to mankind. Later, Eli Lilly joined hands with the scientists
Noyce’s chip solved many practical problems that the
which may have made an immediate cards were used. They developed it into a tangible business microchip developed by Kilby had not. Today, a world and in 1982, along with Genentech, launched the world’s first insulin-
splash but faced obsolescence with phenomenon. In India, the concept of plastic money caught on in the without chips is inconceivable and in the not-so- Humulin. The global sales of insulin is expected to double to around
the passage of time. There are still late 1980s, only after private sector banking came into practice. Today, distant future, microchips will process information $15 billion by 2010. Danish company Novo Nordisk is the global
more ideas whose impact remains as all private sector banks and many nationalised banks offer credit cards, faster than the human brain. Brace up for super- leader with 45% market share followed by American rival Eli Lilly,
big today as it was on the day they the market leader being ICICI Bank. human robots. with about 30%.
were announced. Which of these
scenarios does the idea fall in and to
what extent?
Outsourcing is a plain-vanilla sub-contracting process, Videoconferencing (VC) took its baby steps as far back
The CEOs were asked to allocate traditionalists contend. Actually, it goes back to 19th as the 1920s when engineers at Bell Telephone
points (from 1 to 10, with 10 century manufacturing when the sweating system Laboratories started thinking of ways to transmit voice
prevailed in American cities. Suppliers used to OUTSOURCING VIDEO and video over phone lines. On April 7, 1927, Bell Labs’
being the highest) to each of the
three parameters for every idea.
‘outsource’ the work of making garments and boots for IS KING CONFERENCING office played host to an initial demonstration of what
the American Forces to sub-contractors. The process would later come to be known as video-conferencing.
Points given to the three continued to remain in manufacturing with large-scale This two-way television as a system of communication
parameters were then summed sub-contracting of production work to suppliers in Asia was refined further only in 1956, when AT&T made the
up to find how many points out by companies like Nike in the 1970s. Many companies first PicturePhone test system, a kind of visual
of a total of 30 points a CEO had also decided to set up subsidiaries in Asia to handle telephone. In the 1990s, VC systems resorted to open
given to an idea. Finally, the total some of the production work. standards and were no more expensive proprietary
marks, given by the 50 CEOs, for In the 1980s, outsourcing moved beyond the realm of equipment and software. Soon, Internet Protocol-based
each idea was collated to manufacturing with services, such as travel booking videoconferencing became possible and later advances
determine the total overall and payroll processing, being forked out to players like shifted it to personal computers as well.
points. The idea which got the American Express and EDS. But outsourcing’s heydays VC has revolutionised not only the way business is
really took wing in the 1990s with IT as American firms done, but has also facilitated telemedicine, tele-
maximum points was ranked
handed over their applications development and education and helps the environment. It has brought
one. One with the least points maintenance work to foreign vendors, such as Indian down time and expenses on travel as business meetings
came 25th on the list. IT and BPO companies. can be done with participants in distant places.
It took a 007 for the world to fully come to Nobody can dispute the revolution that e- Although the human race had developed
terms with Global Positioning System, or GPS. mailing has brought about. A small kilobyte cooling systems in ancient times, with
As Korean Airlines Flight 007 strayed into sent on the information superhighway has Romans cooling buildings by flowing water
former USSR prohibited airspace in 1983, it made a giga-leap for all mankind. The FREE through aqueducts in the walls, it took Willis
was duly shot down. The world was shaken, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Carrier to challenge nature by inventing the
and the then US President Ronald Reagan Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) is MAIL first modern electrical air-conditioning
stirred into action by issuing a directive believed to be the first computer to device in 1902 in the US. He developed the
making GPS freely available for civilian use for demonstrate e-mailing. Users of CTSS could product while solving a task to stem
the greater good. The GPS, simply put, uses a store files online from a remote location, just fluctuating heat and humidity conditions at
constellation of 24 to 32 Medium Earth Orbit like emails today are stored on Yahoo or a printing plant. Surrounded by fog while
satellites that transmit microwave signals, Google servers. Like some of the other waiting for a train in Pittsburgh, Carrier
which enable GPS receivers to determine their technology inventions, the roots of e-mailing refined the idea of a machine which would
current location, time and velocity. can also be traced to the US Department of control heat, humidity, air circulation and
Though it is managed by the US Air Force’s Defense (DoD). E-mailing became a regular ventilation, besides cleaning the air. Then,
50th Wing, GPS is now commonly used by feature for users of the DoD’s ARPANET (the the father of modern air-conditioning
civilians for navigation. The GPS has early form of internet). It was here that use of formed his own company, Carrier
revolutionised the way people find each other. the @ sign became popular in 1970s. Engineering Corp., with the idea of selling
GPS devices now come fitted in mobile As the internet evolved, web-based mail cooling gadgets in 1915. The company
phones, PDAs, laptops, cars, bikes, airplanes, became a regular but paid feature offered by bearing his name marketed its
cycles, ships, parachutes and even trekking many ISPs. Lycos.com used to offer paid email air-conditioners to consumers in the 1950s
shoes. Such devices are now used for finding as early as 1995. But it took an Indian, Sabeer and was later acquired by UTC. It continues
stray dogs and cats to accurately dropping GPS Bhatia, in 1997 to popularise the use of free e- to be the world’s largest air-conditioning AIR
missiles and bombs in battle zones. TRACKING mail via his free webmail service—Hotmail. firm today. CONDITIONING
Despite a century, photography remained an elitist and The world, which boasts of having dedicated TV
expensive hobby for humanity, which resorted to the channels on every possible subject, traces the origin of
tedious and expensive analog photography process. Cable TV to the states of Arkansas, Oregon and
The commercial introduction of digital cameras in 1997 Pennsylvania in US. In a bid to provide television
changed the notion completely, beginning a process of entertainment in rural areas (where television signals
‘democratisation’ of photography, making it within were not accessible), a TV (sets) salesman came up with
reach of the have-nots. With a peak sale the idea of using cable in 1948. But the pilot transmission
of 30 million analogue camera units in a single year in DIGITAL CABLE was done almost simultaneously by James Y. Davidson,
the early 1990s, digital camera sales surged and crossed CAMERAS TV Leroy "Ed" Parsons, John Walson and Martin Malarkey in
the 100 million-mark in 2004. Till date, around 500 the US. This was followed by English movie channel HBO
million digital camera units have been becoming the first to use satellite mode of transmitting
sold worldwide. content in 1976. From the basic analog terrestrial
The technology, which involves recording of still images broadcast in the 1920s to Cable & Satellite TV, the mode
and video as a computerised file on memory cards, took of transmission for providing content has now
over two decades to go commercial and involved work transformed into direct-to-home (DTH), Internet
by many individuals and companies. Besides the Protocol Television (IPTV) and even mobile TV.
economics, it offered other advantages like displaying Cable & Satellite television, which started in India during
images on a LCD screen, storing thousands of images the Gulf War, is one of the cheapest forms of
and deleting them, making it an instant hit. entertainment for consumers.
www.ideas.economictimes.com
ideas 24 7
Although night games played under floodlights From the first floppy disks in the 1970s that
dates back to the 1880s, it took the big league found a way into most of our lives, the concept
baseball clubs to adopt the gimmick as late as of how much may be stored has come a long
May 24, 1935, when the first night game in Major NIGHT MEMORY way. The floppy, which had a capacity of around
League history kicked off between the Cincinnati
Reds and Philadelphia Phillies at Crosley Field. GAMES STICKS
80KB, pales in significance when compared to
the 64GB pen drives. Undoubtedly, memory
X
In cricket, Kerry Packer and his World Series Cup storage devices have evolved. You can experience The Power of Ideas in many ways. From
'circus' saw a match being played for the first Compact disks, which were first commercialised connecting with like-minded people to getting answers on all
time under lights. Innovation stayed with the by Sony and Phillips, in the mid-1980s, have aspects of running a business. From submitting your Business
game and just when tests and one-day games moved to a stage of sophisticated DVDs and Summary and obtaining funding to nominating your friends to
were becoming a bit much for the audience, the now Blue-ray discs. Twenty years on, and Sony is participate. Start engaging today.
England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) pushing the Blue-rays on its Playstation. Now is
introduced 20-20 in the UK with the first set of the age of iPods, gaming consoles and external
matches being played on June 13, 2003. In an era hard disks that store music, movies and files. RANK THE IDEAS
of shortened attention spans, time crunches and The future is probably the dumb-bell shaped
most importantly, corporate sponsorships, Lalit 'rotaxane' molecule, which has been used by
Modi did not have an idea but merely realised UCLA and the California Institute of Technology Go through the 25 greatest business ideas of our time and rank
the viability of an existing idea, in terms of to fabricate memory at a density of 100 billion them according to your judgment. Log onto
eyeball grabs and the financials. bits per square centimeter. http://www.ideas.economictimes.com/idea_25_business
_ideas.aspx and make the most of this opportunity to decide
which are the greatest from among them
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