At iSPIRT, our belief is that banking will change more in the next five years than it has in the last 50 years. For a variety of reasons, the changes happening in India will follow a path that is very different from other countries. Indian Banks therefore have two choices: Create a new playbook to deal with these changes, or stick to the old rulebook and risk being disrupted. In mid-2015, Nandan...
It’s to the credit of policymakers that they have steadfastly refused to kiss this pig called ‘software patents’, despite it being dressed up in the lipstick of ‘innovation’. Lipstick on a pig” is a popular Americanism for making superficial or cosmetic changes that disguise the true nature of a product. The pig in question is the regime of software patents being advocated by some multinational...
A couple of months ago, you might have noticed press reports where iSPIRT took a strong stance against software patents in India. The global experience with software patents has been that it leads to increased patent litigation, and uncertainty for startups. Thanks to some enlightened policy making, India has been relatively free of the kind of software patent lawsuits that we see in the US, and...
Open Innovation has lead to the creation of priceless resources like Wikipedia, and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that form the foundations of our digital society. The freedoms enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of young people around the world, hacking on laptops, hacking on servers, hacking on general purpose hardware is the primary source of the innovation which drove much of the...
iSPIRT organized a OEQ(Open Ecosystem Hangout) on 20th April, 2015, to understand the role of software patents within the software ecosystem.Software patents are a much debated subject in the technology world today. In some jurisdictions like India, software is not part of patentable subject matter, while in other jurisdictions like the US, software patents are rampant. Do Indian startups need...
