For example, when cellphones began to be introduced in developing countries, almost no one anticipated the impact they would have on the poor in both rural and urban areas. In a sense, the cellphone made communication easier for the well-off, but for the poor, it opened up a whole new channel of communication, data and information that would not be as easily (if at all) available to them.

In fact, the existence of the technology itself has brought forth a host of ways in which it can provide a service that people need, whether it is fishermen getting to know the price of their catch or someone sending another a "missed call" as a signal at no cost at all. So while the cellphone was not developed for the poor per se, it has been a boon for them.

What about other needs of poor people where the technology markets don't come up with a solution because there are not enough profits?

A prominent example is cooking stoves. The inefficient and dirty combustion of biomass in traditional chulhas – the primary source of cooking energy for an estimated 770 million people in our country and about 2.5 billion people worldwide – results in a range of health, socio-economic, and environmental impacts.

Incredibly, exposure to the air pollution resulting from this poor combustion of biomass is estimated to be responsible for about 400-550,000 deaths a year in India alone and as many as 1.6 million deaths worldwide. While there have been some efforts at improving the design of cooking stoves to increase their efficiency and reduce the emission of pollutants, the technological and financial resources directed towards this problem have been far from commensurate with the scale of the problem.

And this is not a surprise – as I said earlier, there is little reason for technology firms to focus on this problem for which the overall size of the market (in monetary terms) is not that attractive.

The ministry of new and renewable energy ( MNRE), which launched a National Biomass Cookstoves Initiative in December 2009, is aiming to tackle this issue in an innovative manner. It has partnered with the X-Prize Foundation and IIT Delhi to put together a global prize for next-generation clean cookstoves. (Disclosure: I have been involved in the development of the 'cookstove prize' idea and of the partnership.) This is a very different – and somewhat revolutionary – approach to the problem of developing new technology solutions.

While the idea of such prizes to induce innovation is centuries old – the British Government sponsored the Longitude Prize in 1714 for a method to determine a ship's longitude – its recent reinvigoration came about with the Ansari X Prize, which was a $10 million for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.

The intention is to provide an incentive to firms and groups with the relevant technical expertise to focus their efforts on an area which they would not enter otherwise.

While the size of the purse obviously will be an attraction (although such details of the ministry's cookstove prize are yet to be finalized), the real magnet for these groups to participate is the worldwide recognition that they stand to receive should they develop a technology that would benefit such a large number of people.

An approach such as this, compared to the traditional R&D-driven model, is a very different way to promote the development of technologies where there is a market failure, as is often the case for meeting the needs of the poor. The MNRE's partnership is a wonderful example of out-of-the-box thinking. If we want to leverage the power of technology for such applications, we will have to be creative in similar ways.

The author is professor of policy studies (Dept of Humanities and Social Sciences) at IIT-Delhi.