Out of the box: (From above) Tourists enjoy one of The Travel Scientist’s autorickshaw rallies; Thomas K.T. (in glasses) and partner Rolf Marren with their golf rug, and edible ice cream spoons from Bakeys

Whenever Aravind Bremanandam planned a holiday, India was his last choice. “A vacation in India meant a boring package tour, where you follow a guide who has mugged up his facts,” says Bremanandam, who worked as a software recovery specialist in Budapest. An automobile freak, he would do off-beat motor tours in Africa and Europe.

Then the Eureka moment happened. “I thought of myself as a client and realised there is a huge market for alternative tourism in India,” he recalls. In 2006, Bremanandam organised a motor rally from Chennai to Kanyakumari. The vehicle he picked was the autorickshaw. “It’s the most Indian vehicle,” he says.

The Rickshaw Challenge — as the event was called — had 25 teams that drove across the Coromandel coast, lived in and learnt about small south Indian towns by night and raised $6,000 as charity for a non governmental organisation, Round Table India. Thrown in were events like learning to speak 16 words of the local language, meeting a notable personality in town and watching a local film and reporting how many shirts the hero changes in the first song.

The next year Bremanandam organised another rally — The Mumbai Express, from Chennai to Mumbai — and he was in business. “I quit my job and entered the travel business,” says Bremanandam, who started The Travel Scientist in Chennai in 2007. The company currently organises four rallies in India and four overseas. “We also plan to start a mentorship programme for travel organisers and invite people to get in touch with new travel ideas,” he says.

Young Indians are thinking out of the box and turning their ideas into businesses. Thanks to their innovations, there is now cutlery that can be eaten, shoes that can be used to find like-minded people at a party, golf rugs that let you play a 9-hole game in your living room.

“The Indian economic system has become liberal, offering opportunities and money. It does not dismiss lateral thinking. So people are giving wing to business ideas that would have seemed absurd a decade ago,” says C. Amarnath, member, governing board, Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), set up by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay. SINE was set up seven years ago to encourage young engineers to invent new technology and make a business out of it. “We have incubated 30 companies. Seventeen others are residents with us,” says Amarnath.

Innovative entrepreneurship is a sign of a maturing economy, says Harish Bijoor, CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., Bangalore. “For urban Indians a career is no longer only about job security and a bank balance. People want more out of work and are exploring off-beat options.” Adds Amarnath, “People are looking for excitement and challenge in work — something that a routine office job does not offer. So they are ready to take risks and strike out on their own.”

Take Muraleedhara Navada. After working for 15 years with Intel Corporation, Navada decided to give it up to chase his dream. “I wanted to apply technology to solve the problems of daily living in India,” says the entrepreneur, who started VidTeq, a Bangalore-based company that offers navigational solutions. The VidTeq website has maps with landmarks blinking on it, a step-by-step route guide and video recordings of all major roads in the city. “While Google gives static pictures, we offer dynamic route maps,” says Navada, who has a US and India patent for his product.

Indeed, India is becoming a hub for innovation. A recent Booz & Company report called Beyond Borders, Global Innovation 1000 ranked India at number seven in innovation and research and development usage. “There are innovations happening in the Internet space, computing, biomedicine, communication, material science and business models,” says Aninda Sen, associate vice-president, Technology Review — a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sen believes that offbeat entrepreneurship has become a hot work option in India because job security is no longer a driving force. “Job security is a thing of the past. Even if you are the best geek in your company, you can get fired. There is risk across the board,” he says.

Bangalore-based furniture designer Thomas K.T. was left without work when recession struck in 2008. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. “I was a golf buff and dreamed of turning my living room into a golf course,” recalls the 31-year-old designer.

Thomas has now come up with a golf rug that is a replica of a golf course — complete with its complexities, contours and colours. “Customers can opt for different difficulty levels and can fill a whole room with these rugs,” he says. Although the rug — which costs Rs 350 a square foot — is still at a prototype stage, the manufacturers have sold 10 pieces. “We are trying to get a golf coach to certify it as a practising tool,” says Thomas.

Again, for many of these innovators, business is also a way to give something back to society. When water researcher Narayana Peesapaty found that ground water levels were dipping drastically in India, he invented use-and-eat cutlery. “I invented edible cutlery made of jowar, which is a less irrigation-intensive crop than the more popular rice,” says Peesapaty, managing director, Bakeys Foods Pvt. Ltd, Hyderabad. Currently, Bakeys cutlery comes in two flavours, sweet and savoury. “We plan to launch different flavours for ice cream spoons and also cutlery for diabetics,” says Peesapaty, who sells about three lakh pieces of cutlery — mostly to restaurants and catering businesses — every month.

In 2007, a US-based software professional, Ajit Narayanan, returned to India to invent products for disabled people. Last month, his Chennai-based firm Invention Labs launched a product — Avaz — that converts the head movement of children with cerebral palsy into speech. “India has a high number of disabled people yet there is no technology to assist them. I wanted to do something for them,” says Narayanan.

Every new invention, however, doesn’t become the next iPod. Some sink — like I.B. Saxena’s Anaarkali Chicken. The Hyderabad-based telecom software professional and foodie took seven years to create a special chicken recipe. “In 2008, we launched a website, tied up with Blue Dart and began taking orders from across India,” says Saxena.

He, however, shut shop last year. What went against Anaarkali Chicken was probably its prohibitive price. At Rs 6,000, it cost as much as a meal in a Michelin-starred restaurant.

Saxena may not have managed to sell his hot idea. But for many other young Indians unafraid to tread the path less taken, innovations have become their ticket to an exciting career.