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Indians top global innovation competition

Indians have emerged top two winners of a competition on innovation sponsored by global investment banker Merrill Lynch.

Amit Mehra, who completed his doctoral dissertation from Aeronautics and Astronautics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won the first prize of $50,000, while Satyabrata Patnaik from the Indian Institute of Technology shared the second slot with $20,000.

Mehra won the honour for the development of a working model of a nickel-sized, jet-engine combustion chamber that could convert chemical energy of fuel into electricity for portable electronic devices.

The portable power could benefit numerous industrial and consumer products, he said citing as an example a laptop computer which runs for weeks without being plugged into an electrical outlet.

Patnaik had shaped a high-temperature superconducting wire with the potential to alleviate energy supply problem.

Announcing the awards yesterday, Merrill Lynch chairman and chief executive officer David H Komansky said it would arrange the winners to meet venture capitalists to translate their innovative research to commercial applications.

They would retain intellectual property rights of the inventions and would have no future obligation to Merrill Lynch, he said.

The company has awarded prizes totalling $175,000 to 11 academics and six universities in its third annual Global Innovation Grants Competition, aimed at helping to move academic research to real world commercial applications.

The other winning entries were from five academics in the United States and four in Australia.

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