DCE is holding its annual Tech Fest Innova from 23rd February to 27th February. Ideawicket is DCE's online partner and technical support partner this year. We are happy to work with the very talented Sukrit Anand, Sankalp Raghuvanshi and Sumit Periwal towards making the event a big success. The theme for this year's tech fest is 'Science & Technology for the environment'. There are a total of eleven events for which registration is open on Ideawicket. The events range from Eureka the B Plan Contest to Papyrus the technical paper competition and the brain racking MADS puzzle challenge. Challenge your friends at other colleges by participating in MADS and track your score on the leaderboard!

CHESA (Chemical Engineers Students Association) at Nirma University is holding its annual event Chemozale 2009 on March 21-22. Students with designs or prototypes for a water purifier or solar heater will find Purify and Urja events interesting. You can also use the Ideawicket site to submit entries for Rainmaker B Plan Contest and Papyrus technical paper competition. Chemozale 2009 has esteemed supporters including the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Government of India, TIE and the National Innovation Foundation. Ideawicket is CHESA's innovation partner for the festival. Congratulations Swapnil and Rachit for all the hard work you have put in so far!

Thank you for your continued support of the Ideawicket 'Open Innovation Portal'. The global financial crisis and its resulting instability means that the youth everywhere has to redouble its focus on innovation coming up with new products, services, delivery methods and business models in tune with the current times.

Indian college students have a unique advantage in that the education system provides students the time and infrastructural support to pursue academic or industrial training projects in their area of choice. This gives students an opportunity to delve deep into their chosen topic, ask questions and look for answers. The problems that the world faces today can be met head on with a good dose of innovation. The next ten years will see the birth and success of companies and business models that are just a thought in some college student's mind today.

The Ideawicket portal can help you find collaborators or draw the attention of other players in your field. As financial markets get decimated, science, technology and sustainable businesses that deliver true value will be more important than ever. Companies will strive to recruit candidates who can create real value instead of glib talkers and polished salesmen.

Use Ideawicket to post a project or creative ideas, update your academic profile or learn about Innocentive Challenges. Tell your friends and classmates about Ideawicket and help it become a centre for innovative and open minded learning.

Looking forward to your feedback and continued participation,

Wishing you a Happy Diwali!

Best Regards

Ideawicket Team

We are happy to announce our Orkut Application the 'Idea Box'.

The Idea Box lets users express designs, projects, innovations, their ideas on social issues, environment, technology, daily life. You can showcase your ideas on your profile page, ask questions regarding your ideas and solicit feedback in the form of answers and comments.

We are working hard to introduce new features and improve the user experience of Idea Box. So please add the Idea Box application, post your ideas, comment on ideas and let us know what you think and how we can improve the Idea Box.

After the huge success of Best College Project Contest 2007, Ideawicket is happy to bring to you the Best College Project Contest 2008.

Ideawicket is inviting engineering and design projects from students across India till 11 am, April 25 2008. The projects will be visible to all site visitors and registered members and they can rate the projects on a scale of 1 to 5. The project with the highest user rated score will win an Apple iPod nano 4 GB.

So hurry up and post your projects and invite your friends to score your entry to win the Apple iPod nano.

Entrepreneurship Development Cell (EDC), Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Park (STEP), IIT Roorkee recently hosted the ISIS'08 Business Plan Competition where they invited participants from all across India to participate in the Business Plan Challenge.

At stake were prizes worth INR 2,00,000 opportunity to get seed funding up USD 1 million from ISIS'08 associates and mentorship from experts in the field.

The contest was hosted on Ideawicket where it attracted a lot of participation from institutes across India. The quality of business plans coming in was very high. Ideawicket would like to specially thank all the faculty members who helped in promoting the event.

The deadline for the submission of executive summary was 6 pm, 18th February 2008. The shortlisted finalists will be announced by 5th of March and then the teams will be paired with Mentors to help and guide them in the further development of their Business Plans. The teams will be required to submit their final business plan by 10th April and will have to make a detailed presentation in IIT Roorkee.

Many thanks to everyone for your participation!

A very 'Happy New Year' to all our members and site visitors. As we usher in the New Year we are very excited about the possibilities that 2008 will bring. We have high hopes that Ideawicket will be able to help people with innovations and designs actualize the potential of their ideas. We would also like to see Indian companies realize the importance of design sensibility and what experts call 'Design Thinking'. Given the thin line between Innovation and Design (rational versus emotional), we hope to provide an outlet for both.

Ideawicket has recently tied up with TePP i.e. Technopreneur Promotion Programme a joint initiative of Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and TIFAC- DST under the Ministry of Science and Technology, India. TePP provides grants and mentoring to independent Indian innovators to emerge as entrepreneurs in two phases. Phase 1 is innovation incubation (maximum support Rs 15 lakhs) and Phase 2 is enterprise incubation (maximum support Rs 45 lakhs). TePP has outreach centres all over India that provide counseling, mentoring and incubation facilities for developing function proving prototypes.

Some helpful links-

Before you apply please take a look at the TePP Checklist and Dr Rao's blog.

http://www.dsir.nic.in/tpdup/tepp/tepp_checklist.htm

http://tepp-innovators.blogspot.com

The Best College Project Contest is a public contest for projects from Engineering, Arts, Commerce, Sciences or an MBA program. Voting is by site users.
 
Top 10 reasons to participate-
 
- See how your project rates against projects from other institutes across India and abroad
- Learn more about the kinds of projects undertaken by students across different institutes and colleges
- Get new ideas for projects you can work on
- Find a project or idea that you think is incomplete and then work on it
- View the findings of people who undertook projects similar to yours
- Share your learnings with a wider audience
- Find like minded peers who are working in the same area as you and connect with them
- Future students will not need to reinvent the wheel. They can build on the work done by their predecessors
- Showcase your skills and expertise to prospective employers
- Its fun

Best College Project Contest

Does the wait at your bank make you irritable, or parking woes in your city, or the frequency with which your laptop needs to be 'serviced'? Post your ideas on how to apply queuing theory better at banks and cafes, or space saving parking lot designs or dust busters for laptops. If your academic institute is strapped for funds, how could it still improve infrastructure with minimal expenditure or how can you make your home or office complex go green? Students can use Ideawicket to maintain an innovation diary. Highlight how you could reduce wastage at your favorite cafe or movie theatre or a packaging rehaul for personal products. A potential future employer may like your ideas. MBA students could develop business cases around real life management dilemmas and propose solutions. Set yourself apart by showcasing your mind and entrepreneurial thinking!

There's a lot of talk and fear of global warming and the impending environmental catastrophe. But there's a lot we can still do by making small changes in our lifestyles and the products we use. We would love to see innovations and ideas that can help in reducing our burden on our natural resouces in effective ways. If you have any suggestions or thoughts on how existing products, services and policies can be tweaked or modified to reduce their burden on the planet, please post them on Ideawicket. We'd love to get a discussion going!

Honey Bees do two things that most people do not. They collect pollen without impoverishing flowers and connect one flower to another through pollination. The honey bee network is a network of innovators, farmers, scholars, academicians, policy makers, entrepreneurs and non-governmental organizations that seeks to ensure credit is given to the grassroots rural communities and individuals for their innovations. These knowledge holders must share in the gains of value addition to their traditional knowledge. The network champions sustainable innovations by local farmers and rural communities that do not speak English and ensures credit is given where due. The Honey Bee newsletter is published in Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, Malayalam and Oriya in addition to English so that it can reach local communities who are the true knowledge bearers of traditional science.
 
Over the last 16 years the network has prepared a database of 51,000 knowledge innovations and practices, a lot of it by visiting remote villages and hamlets on foot.
 
To see how you can help or join click here.

There's a great article in the June issue of Harvard Business Review by Satish Nambisan and Mohanbir Sawhney 'A buyer's guide to the innovations bazaar' that talks about how increasingly companies are shopping outside their organizations for innovation and what factors they should consider while navigating through the 'innovations bazaar'. The bazaar contains a bewildering array of choices- raw ideas, patented ideas, market ready ideas and market ready products and technologies. But there are trade offs among the choices. "Sourcing raw ideas costs less and allows a company to increase its reach (the number of options it is able to consider) but involves higher risk and a longer time to market. The reverse is true for acquiring market ready products".

They also discuss the different roles of innovation intermediaries that companies can engage - idea scouts, innovation capitalists, business incubators etc. and what each one brings to the table. The article could be a very useful tool that can help companies choose their innovation sourcing strategy.

Read 'A Buyer's Guide to the Innovations Bazaar'

We recently came across Abhijit Bairagi's website and were really tickled by the flow and design.

Abhijit will be graduating from the Masters in Design program at IIT Kanpur this summer and has shared several ideas on Ideawicket. His creations include 'Lush' a tetra pack for packaging coconut water, 'F'light' a floor lamp that can be kicked around, and a 'C'are' cup coaster that he calls a manifestation of the Glove paradigm. He also has other cool concepts on his site like a recyclable paper fly swatter and cell phone concepts that he worked on during an internship at LG Electronics.

Abhijit is writing his thesis in finding product qualities that people find endearing. He says that his products strive to be simple, practical, usable and hence lovable. And he lives by the mantra, 'I strongly believe that answers are found not made.'

You can find Abhijit's profile here.