‘Innovation is a need’ Date:   Friday , December 02, 2005 Do not look deeply at how others have solved a problem at the initial stages of finding an original solution to a problem as it can bias your thinking and hinder creativity,” says Sriram Sethuraman, Video Technologist at Ittiam Systems revealing his mantra for innovation. Sriram and his team work on algorithms related to video compression reduces the complexity and improving the overall visual quality of an encoder, decoder, or transcoder. It was not the patent the team received that excited Sethuraman but it is the work they executed to bring out the new solution. “Rapid and constant innovation is key for a company such as Ittiam that has intellectual property licensing as its core business,” he says. Generally, those with doctoral degrees choosing a career in the industry tend to file patents fairly early in their career. The same thing happened with Sriram; he filed his first patent while at Sarnoff Corporation at the age of 27. It is Charlie Wine, from Sarnoff, whom Sriram considers as his role model; At the age of 65 Wine had received more than 100 patents and continued to innovate in new technology areas. “Patents are only one way of measuring creativity, as all innovations may not be patented,” says Sriram. Sriram Sethuraman 36 Technologist/Senior Member of Technical Staff, Video and Imaging Group, Ittiam Systems Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore, India l. He played a crucial role in optimizing video encoders and decoders on DSPs, low-complexity MPEG-2 to H.264 transcoding, and creating intellectual property in the areas of video encoding, preprocessing and post-processing. 2. Received a B.E. from Anna University, a M.S from Villonova University and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. 3. Started his career with Sarnoff Corporation in 1996, Joined Ittiam Systems, Bangalore in 2002. 4. Over the past nine years, he has received 19 patents, with 5 more pendings approval and several yet to be filed.