"Frugal engineering is about getting more out of every single gram of material", says Ramesh Mashelkar. "That is not taught in Western society." A different kind of mindset is needed. Thus, Davy Hwang and engineers at GE Bangalore created an ECG machine at one-sixth of the usual cost by stripping out all unnecessary parts and modifying a bus ticket printer to keep development costs down. For Kannan of Vortex Engineering, part of the mindset involves freeing yourself from what has gone before. "Ignorance is bliss, as they say - but in a good way! So I chose not to look at conventional [ATM] machines. If I did so and thought, where can I save energy, materials and so on, then I'd maybe have come up with something 20% better [in terms of energy use]. I wanted [mine] to be ten times better." His lesson to other innovators? "Don't assume that the features are needed just because they are built like that elsewhere."
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