India Land of a Billion Entrepreneurs 1st Edition

3

The Face of the Inventor

“A dream with courage is innovation … A dream without courage is delusion”.

I was on a flight to Ahmedabad. It was 25 October 2006. The Indian Institute of Management (IIM) was holding its third workshop on the topic ‘Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship’. I had been selected out of a long list of inventors for my work on passive cooling. My entry for the workshop was a system called the ‘Earth-Air Cooling Tube’. The tagline for it was—’Hand over your air-conditioning to Mother Earth’.

The widget consisted of a pipe that is buried vertically in the ground, like in a tube well. A smaller pipe is fitted into this pipe so that the two pipes are concentric. The smaller pipe is exposed to the atmosphere, while ...