The aerospace manufacturer has worked with the Indian government's Ministry of Science and Technology since IGP was launched in 2007.

The program boosts the marketing abilities of entrepreneurs. Many have good, proven ideas and products but possess little experience and financial backing to move their inventions out of the laboratories and into the market, either as stand-alone products or as an original equipment manufacturer.

IGP focuses on training the entrepreneurs using world-class commercialization strategies, a statement by Lockheed Martin said.

Participants come not just from aerospace, information technology and defense sectors but also biotechnology, transportation, environmental, petrochemical and others.

"Today's increasingly complex, global challenges require innovative and affordable solutions," said Ray O. Johnson, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Lockheed Martin Corp.

"Innovation is a key driver to solving these global challenges and this program will nurture the new ideas that will become these solutions. We are proud to offer continued support for these talented Indian entrepreneurs, and we are grateful for what we learn from them. They teach us that innovation depends on good ideas as much as on resources."

Lockheed Martin's other partners in the IGP are the Indian government's Department of Science and Technology, the IC2 Institute of the University of Texas at Austin, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum.

Around 240 innovators have received training on commercialization strategies. Another 120 have attended programs on venture formation, finance and marketing.

Participants also receive training on how to analyze the market potential of their products.

"The India Innovation Growth Program is an attempt to identify and fill in the existing gap between technological innovations and their appropriate commercialization," V.K. Topa, adviser to the secretary-general of FICCI.

"There is a strong need to create higher synergies between the world of science and the world of business to ensure that the intellectual capital available with our scientific fraternity gets appropriately translated into commercial products and services for the benefit at large."

Last May, Minister of State for Science and Technology Prithviraj Chavan said the government wants the country's private sector to play a more active role and make available more money to support scientific research and development.

"We spend about 1 percent of our (gross domestic product) on scientific research and development," said Chavan. "Of this, three-fourths comes from the public sector. We want private sector's active participation in this. We are running many programs under the public-private-participation model, holding hands of the private sector but we want them to invest aggressively."

Chavan also said it would be difficult for the government to double the spending on the R&D to 2 percent of the GDP by next year. But India has extended higher tax incentives to corporations that spend on in-house R&D and also to private scientists.

A study of global engineering research and development published in July noted that the United States, which accounts for around 40 percent of ER&D spending -- the most in the world -- continues to be a leader in terms of establishing global engineering networks.

But the United States faces a shortage of low-priced talent and India has established itself as the premier location for offshore ER&D services, the study, Global ER&D: Accelerating Innovation with Indian Engineering, said.

India's supply base supports innovations in areas including automotive hybrid technology, avionics and structures, telecoms -- especially next-generation routers and low-cost medical devices.

The study, by management consulting firm Booz & Company with India's National Association of Software and Services Companies, said that India's ER&D providers have the potential to capture a 40 percent share of global offshore revenues in 11 key verticals by 2020.

"India is the only country in the world to offer a large third-party engineering vendor base," Sunil Sachan, principal at Booz & Company, said.

earlier related report
Poverty crisis blights S. America growth
Rio De Janeiro (UPI) Sep 9, 2010 - Extreme poverty of millions of citizens in the Caribbean and South America blights phenomenal economic growth witnessed in recent years.

Top of the list of countries with the most glaring inequalities are nations that have laid claim to regional leadership, diplomatic pre-eminence or promises of catapulting their societies into the 21st century.

When documented evidence of abusive governance and human rights violations are added to the list of shortcomings the picture becomes bleaker, analysts said.

Some of the problems cited by campaigners and human rights activists were acknowledged in the first U.N. Development Program Human Development Report for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The UNDP report, "Acting On The Future: Breaking The Intergenerational Cycle of Inequality," said Latin America and the Caribbean ranked as the most unequal region in the world because populations in the area have the world's highest levels of differences in wealth and income.

The report called for social policies that tackle the problem of inequality in the Caribbean and Latin American region.

"This inequality is persistent, self-perpetuating in areas where social mobility is low and it poses an obstacle to progress in human development," UNDP said.

Ten of the 15 most unequal countries in the world are in the region, yet it is possible to reduce inequality through the implementation of public policies that lift the region out of the inequality trap, UNDP said.

The policies must have an impact on people, address the set of constraints that perpetuate poverty and inequality and empower people to feel they are in charge of their development destinies, said the report.

"This report reaffirms the critical importance of the fight against poverty, while indicating that it is necessary to go further," said UNDP Regional Director Heraldo Munoz.

"Inequality is inherently an impediment to progress in the area of human development and efforts to reduce inequality must be explicitly mainstreamed in the public agenda," he said.

For UNDP "equality is instrumental in ensuring meaningful liberties; that is to say, in terms of helping all people to share in meaningful life options so that they can make autonomous choices," he added.

Women, indigenous populations and those of African descent are the groups hardest hit by inequality. Women in the region are paid less than men for the same work, they have a greater presence in the informal economy and they face a double workload, the UNDP report pointed out.

Compared to those of European descent, twice as many members of indigenous and African descended populations, on average, live on $1 per day, UNDP said.

"Inequality is a source of social vulnerability. For that reason, as the report shows, it's critical to advance knowledge of the factors explaining inequality in human development in Latin America and the Caribbean and its persistence from one generation to the next," said UNDP Associate Administrator Rebeca Grynspan.

"That would allow the proposal of a strong framework for development of targeted policies that drive a more equality-based development," she added.

Inequality in the region is 65 percent higher than in high-income countries, 36 percent more than East Asia and 18 percent higher than in sub-Sahara Africa.

"The country with the lowest incomes' inequality is Uruguay and Bolivia the highest," said the report.

Regarding access to services and infrastructure Peru presents the largest gap, 57 percent for drinking water, comparing the richest fifth with the poorest fifth. Countries with the smallest gaps are Chile, 5 percent; Argentina, 4 percent; Costa Rica, 4 percent; and Uruguay, 2 percent. More specifically regarding access to the power grid, in Peru the gap is 55 percent compared to Chile's 1 percent.

UNDP said inequality in Latin America isn't only deep but sustained since gaps have remained virtually unmoved since the 1970s.

Human rights abuses, an area not directly mentioned in the UNDP report, were cited in a series of recent reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Local groups representing Indian citizens of Latin American countries, including regional leader Brazil, say their views are seldom aired in the media that are dominated by the more influential and wealthier citizens of European decent.

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