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

After months of work Ideawicket is finally faster and easier to use.

Posting of innovations has been made easier and is now restricted to only two steps. You can also build a more detailed profile on the site by using the 'Edit Profile' option and adding your academic specialization, your degree and what you hope to find through the site. It could be a live college project, an internship, an innovation challenge, a buyer for your prototype, potential collaborators or funding for your innovation. The more details you provide the easier it will be for us to help you find what you are looking for.

We will contact organizations on your behalf that may be able to offer college projects/innovation challenges for interested and qualified students and faculty if they find a good talent/skill/experience match. The site is also on the radar of organizations that incubate and help commercialize ideas for individual innovators. So make sure you showcase your content in the best way possible.

The last two months saw two winners emerge for the Best College Project Contest and the Hack a Product to Go Green Contest. Vinit Gawande of IIT, Mumbai won an Ipod nano (4GB) for his innovation Low Cost Wireless Internet Access for Rural Areas using Tethered Aerostats and Vikas Chutani of Gurgaon won a cash prize of Rupees Five Thousand for his ideas on 'What could we do to prevent global warning'. The Best College Project contest saw intense competition and brought in some truly innovative ideas that students are working on.

Thank you for all your supportive emails and messages. Your feedback is invaluable to us, so please do continue to share your thoughts on how we can make Ideawicket more useful to you.

Best Brains of India Quiz

There is a new Quiz on the site with questions on topics ranging from Science and Technology to Space and the Internet. The fun part is that you can compose your own questions to challenge other participants. College scores will be displayed on the site in some time. If you would like your individual score to contribute to your college score please select your college from the institute list and confirm your student status by inputting your official student email address. You will receive an activation email at that address. To keep things honest, questions posted by you will not be visible to you or your college mates but only to participants from other colleges. You can compose a total of 5 questions for the quiz.

If you see an incorrect or inappropriate question, you can report it to site admin by clicking on the link provided for the same. You can answer a maximum of 5 questions in a day. For each correct answer you would get one point. An incorrect answer would reduce the score by 0.25. In case you post an inappropriate question or wrong question you will be penalized 5 points.

Users who are not students or whose colleges do not provide official email ids to students can participate by choosing 'Other' from the dropdown list. If your academic institute does provide official student email ids to students but the institute name is missing from our list please shoot us a message through the 'Contact Us' form 

So go ahead, compose mind boggling questions and compete to be ranked the campus with the best brains in India!

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

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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'

Corporations looking to source their innovation from savvy consumers and talented problem-solvers can post their innovation requirements on Ideawicket. Businesses can benefit because they no longer have to restrict their research and development efforts to their own employees. They can use the site to solicit solutions for specific problems or browse the innovations that are shared with them by innovators. We encourage innovators to state what specific corporations they feel would benefit most from their innovation.

Corporations can reward innovators by offering a specific prize or signing licensing deals or a royalty based payoff. Ideawicket itself does not get involved in the negotiation process. Both parties will have to conduct their own due diligence before striking a deal and agreeing to each other's terms and conditions. We help the two parties get acquainted by bringing them together on a common platform.

Ideawicket can prove useful for organizations in many ways:-

1. Product Development - to develop new products or improve existing ones. Who better than savvy, well educated consumers to guide you on what products they would find useful and like to buy.
2. Better Processes - customers can suggest cost saving and efficient solutions for services they use frequently.
3. Non-Profit /charitable organizations - for environmental, health and social issues. For instance Global warming is well recognized as a huge problem. You can invite innovations from site visitors on new products, services or behaviors that will reduce energy consumption, promote alternatives to fossil fuels, new techniques that cut down on waste, better recycling solutions etc.

We feel that Ideawicket can be a very useful tool for corporations that are serious about innovation. Use it to recruit your consumers and other well educated and well informed creative people worldwide to create future goods and sevices.
 

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.

The Webster dictionary defines innovation as 'the introduction of something new' or 'a new idea, method or device'. On Ideawicket you can post innovations spanning a host of topics.

It could be a raw idea, a project at school or a design you are already showcasing on your own site. Industrial and Product designers can explain their product in detail and get feedback from other interested users. If you are loyal to a brand say for your MP3 player or mobile phone or TV you probably have tons of ideas about how these products could be improved. Or if  there is something about your favorite coffee chain or bank or electric company that really irks you and you have a solution for how they could improve their processes posting your solution here could engender an interesting debate.

Another category of innovations we would love to see more of would be ecological innovations with socially conscious and sustainable solutions. So post your ideas and let corporations know what products and services you would like from them.

This is one of the more frequently asked questions. You can control who can view your innovation.

While posting your innovation you can either showcase your Idea to the world by marking it as 'Public' or restrict who can view it by marking it as 'Private'. If you decide to make your innovation 'Private' it will not be visible to any site visitors. Further you have the option of disclosing your 'Private' innovation to select individuals by granting them access. You can either add registered users or invite your friends to join the site and view your 'Private' innovation.

Please feel free to contact us should you have any further queries.

At Ideawicket we believe that innovation cannot be restricted to just scientists and researchers working in labs and universities or professional inventors toiling over their latest creation. We believe that there is an innovator in each one of us.

We’ve all had an Aha moment when we thought of a product or service that is not available in the marketplace but that we would find very useful or enjoyable. Ideawicket has been started to give a voice to people who during the daily course of their lives envision better products, processes and services that they would like to share with others or bring to the attention of organizations that offer those goods and services.

Corporations on the other hand are beginning to realize that they can no longer source all their innovation needs from their own employees. Customers and the general public can be very active contributors towards the development of new products, processes and experiences. A good example is Slim Devices where customers design the products.
 
So showcase and promote your innovations and bring them to the attention of corporations and organizations that offer them. It’s creative, solution-oriented and more constructive than merely telling corporations that their products and services are unsatisfactory or irresponsible. Or as Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Hi everyone! It's really exciting for us to see people coming to post their innovations and designs on the site. A big thanks to everyone who has shared their ideas and concepts so far.

There are certain features and functionalities in the site that we feel are not being exploited by innovators to their full potential. To mention a few-

1. 'Market, Cost, Time Analysis', 'Intellectual Property Details' and 'User Benefits' tabs -  Your content will be more useful and interesting to the reader if you separate the details of your innovation into distinct headings. We encourage you to post more details, as it will help site visitors in gaining a better understanding of your product or concept. You can post up to 5 images for your innovation through the 'Update Image' tab. Readers would then be able to provide you higher quality and more incisive feedback.

2. Private Messenger and Comments - Use them to share your thoughts on interesting content posted on the site.

3. 'Pitch to Companies' - Fill out the 'Pitch to Companies' tab by 'editing' your innovation. If you mention specific organizations or corporations you may be interested in pitching your innovation to, we will try to get them to sign up as corporate members. You can also use 'tags' to specify companies you want to target for your innovation.

Our goal is to try and get the companies you are targeting to register on the site so that you can pitch your innovation directly to them.

Your comments and suggestions have been most helpful in ironing out initial glitches. Thanks for all your feedback and interest.

Ideawicket is really simple to use. After signing up you can post your innovation and add pictures and a video feed. You can share your content with everyone by making it 'public' or dazzle only friends and family by keeping it 'private'.

If you have a specific corporation or organization in mind that could really benefit from your innovation, you could use the 'pitch to companies' option while posting your innovation to let us know. This information will help us approach these companies and encourage them to register as corporate members. Once they are signed up you would be able to pitch your innovation to the corporation of your choice. (We do not however guarantee that your innovation will reach them.)

So go ahead and explore the site. We hope you enjoy it and look forward to your feedback.

After many modifications and revisions in the last one year, we are finally ready with our open innovation portal. It's a place to share your inventiveness and shape the future of new products and processes.

You can post your ideas and designs for products and services you've thought about but never found in shopping aisles and stores. Suggest ways to save time and money by improving processes you see big corporations using but you find wasteful. Since we are in beta testing you might encounter some bugs and glitches while using the site. Your comments and feedback on the same are really appreciated. Enjoy the site and let us know how we can make it better for you.