It's poetic justice of sorts that business today, a magazine that believes in the power of ideas, is the first publication to recognise a truth that stares us all in the face: That India is a nation of ideas and an ideas-superpower in the making. Chances are, this won't be the last you hear on this topic.

The idea for this issue came from several sources and in several forms: a government-owned laboratory filing the most patents in the country; the chief of another government-owned laboratory defecting to the private sector; a resurgence in venture capital activity in the country, this time focused around the creation of IP (Intellectual Property); a continuation of the trend of multinationals putting down research laboratories and development centres in India; and a significant growth in patent-filing activity by Indian companies. Like all good ideas it grew and grew till it acquired a life of its own.

Early on in the making of this, BT's Twelfth Anniversary Issue, it became evident that this wasn't just about multinationals setting research-shop in India.

That's a trend that began almost two decades ago and although it has gathered momentum in the recent years, it isn't a new phenomenon. Nor is it all there is to India being an ideas superpower. The currency of any ideas revolution is ip, more significantly, patents. If our hypothesis on India becoming an ideas-superpower was right, the reasoning within the magazine went, then it would show in the number of patents being filed from India.

Sure enough, in 2003, some 1,700 patents filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office were assigned to Indian companies or inventors (the number was 1,200 in 2002). These numbers were some of the significant ones that emerged from a first of its kind survey of patent filing activity in India, comducted for Business Today by our research partner Evalueserve, an IP research firm.

It also became evident, early on, that not all the Big Ideas evolving had to do with technology. That explains the sheer diversity of the ideators profiled in this issue: from ITC's Yogi Deveshwar and S. Sivakumar, the men behind the e-choupal idea that could revolutionise distribution to Ramesh Ramanathan, a former Citibanker who is rewriting the definition of participative democracy in Bangalore to Udaia Kumar, a do-gooder who runs India's largest micro-credit organisation to Dr Venkatswamy, who has shown that profitable and charitable healthcare can co-exist.

One common thread runs through the 11 profiles in this magazine: each of these individuals has a Big Idea, and this could change the world.

Interspersed with the profiles-they are undoubtedly the piece de resistance of this issue-are columns on the same theme by such worthies as Council of Scientific and Industrial Research head R.A. Mashelkar, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, ICICI Bank Chairman N. Vaghul, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani, and management guru C.K. Prahalad and features authored by our own writers on some of the idea-revolutions happening around us. Happy Reading.