Friday, June 20, 2008

Innovation in Emerging Markets- Microsoft

Dr. Kentaro Toyama, the Co-Founder of Microsoft Research India identified creating technology for emerging markets as one of the key charters of this India lab. On of the areas of focus as a part of this ongoing research is on child education. Dr. Toyama discussed three of the high impact solutions that are been created and successfully launched to address the school based educational system in rural India. These solutions are:

  • Multi-point mouse system: Here CPU, monitor and key board are shared between a group of students, whereas they would use multiple mouse with a different pointer color.

  • Split screen computers: Here the screen could be shared between multiple students while they could have individual mouses and keyboards with shared CPU.

  • Digital StudyHall: This is an attempt to bring good quality level education in digitized format to schools in rural parts of the country. Classes delivered by teachers in city schools are captured and then shared using a DVD player on TV to students in rural schools.

Each of these innovations have been significant in increasing the access to PC for students at a very low cost, thus living up to the commitment on delivering innovations for the emerging markets.

2 comments:

workhard said...

Although that is a splendid idea, the fact of actually implementing it still remains debatable. Forget about rural india, thousands of schools within the city, including almost all government and private schools, lack basic facilities to function normally.

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Anonymous said...

Innovation is not just about generating ideas it should always be clubbed with implementation and funding strategy. The microsoft idea for rural india is a nice idea indeed but lacking any of implementation, Funding strategy as well this is devoid of any time line for deployment. Without them it is destined to be just an idea let alone an innovation!!!