Rustic Technology
He may have your next big idea. Photo: Sujit kumar
You’ve got a small export business, or maybe you’re an importer, and you are looking for a new product idea. You don’t have your own R&D division, so where do you look for ideas? A possibility might be India’s Honey Bee Network.
Never heard of Honey Bee? Neither had I until I saw a report in Asia Times last week. Honey Bee is a foundation that ferrets out inventions and innovations from India’s farm villages, helps the inventors develop them, and then tries to interest companies or investors. Over 21 years, Honey Bee has compiled a database of 140,000 innovations, many of which are “green”. Take the Mitti Cool refrigerator, which is nothing like any fridge you have ever seen. It is made from terracotta clay, not aluminum or steel. It uses no electricity, requires no maintenance and is selling for only $53 at the factory in Gujarat. The earthenware cooler keeps food cool for days. The same inventor, a potter, has an even bigger seller: a non-stick frying pan made from clay that sells for $1. Honey Bee says it is safer than Teflon. Biodegradable, too, I’d bet. The potter has his own website now.
I explored Honey Bee’s website, looking for the database of 140,000 innovations. Honey Bee says they are active in 75 countries and, sure enough, the first innovation I looked at was from Uganda – making cement from rice husks, sand and a residue from a brewery. Just add water! Another innovation was sonic fish traps, developed by a village in Malaysia, that use sound from telephone handsets to attract fish to their nets. One Indian innovator came up with a way to make matchsticks from agricultural waste, rather than freshly-cut trees. A farmer developed a plow for small farms that is driven by a motorcycle.
The database is a bit cumbersome to work with and most of the innovations tend to be agricultural, naturally. It is difficult to browse and could use some volunteer work by an innovative programmer. But there are gems in there if you can find them.
