Big ideas: known for its commodities, Latin America doesn't fall short when it comes to invention and imagination.

What do the Biro ballpoint pen and digital fingerprint readers have in common? They were both invented in Latin America, Argentina to be precise.

Innovation, the creation of new products, technologies and services, is something most often associated with the technology-driven economies of Japan, Europe and the United States, but Latin America contributes its fair share of inventions sold around the world, from the universal to the surprising. Consider Flaps, a magnetic bookmark that Nicolas Javier Di Prinzio developed one night in 1995 after his bookmark fell and he lost his place while reading. The same night he created a prototype that sticks to a page. It even marks the sentence. Not an earthshaking product, but enough to create a company, Flappers, which generates US$500,000 in revenue a year.

It's one thing to create a product from scratch, but it's quite another to get that gizmo into consumers' homes. "The product is very simple but to produce it in volume required a lot of development work for the machinery," says Di Prinzio. "The development process has given me a lot of experience, which is worth more than gold."

Innovation by definition is a gamble. For every winning idea, others fall by the wayside because of financial constraints or competitor reaction. Laboratorio Uruguayo de Produccion de Software (LUPS), a Uruguayan software company, is battling intense competition as it rolls out its GnSYS casino-management system in a market dominated by entrenched European and U.S. suppliers.

Based on work it was doing in Montevideo using Microsoft software, LUPS attracted interest from Gateplus, a Swiss game machine company, and a French casino. "Casinos need cheaper software that can be installed quickly and that works better. Competitors' systems take one month to install but we can put in ours in five days," says LUPS Development Director Marcelo Duarte.

Opportunity. The casino financed the $500,000 in research and development costs to develop the system, which collates accounting and statistical information as well as data coming from the cashiers and gaming tables. The system also manages marketing information and security programs. More importantly, the casino gave LUPS a rare opportunity to pilot the product. "It is difficult to do a pilot because there is a lack of trust in the casino market. Systems are very expensive and casinos do not want to take risks with new products," says Duarte.

With three installations up and running in France, LUPS has piqued the interest of gambling houses in Russia, Venezuela, Chile and Colombia. "The idea now is to complete four or five installations in France and then develop some in South America in Argentina, Chile, Venezuela and Panama," Duarte says.

Get enough junk e-mail? Brazil's UOL says it finds that about 60% of the millions of emails it handles are unwanted marketing messages or worse. Blocking suspect messages is difficult; spammers change up their methods daily, even hourly, making uniform software rules to stop them useless.

To do away with spam, UOL developed a technology in 2003 that lets humans do the trick. Its software asks e-mail senders to view a password composed of colorful and often strangely shaped numbers, letters or images. If the sender wants the email to get there, he or she has got to see and retype the password into a box. Since spammers and virus writers machine-gun their e-mails out by the millions using software, the eyes-only block is effective. "This is very easy for humans but almost impossible for machines," says Victor Bibeiro, UOL's director of strategies and products.

After spending two years in developmental stages, the system is now installed on all of UOL's 8 million mailboxes. "After three years of use it continues to be the most effective way to fight spam," Ribeiro says. So effective, in fact, that it has been copied by the likes of AOL and Earthlink, and has received praise from Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.

The good news doesn't stop at the desktop. Anyone who uses those ubiquitous handheld computers or a newer-generation smartphone knows they are handy. If you are in the distribution business, chances are that your device also carries industry-related software developed by Colombia's Sysgold, which has developed such a reputation as a mobile communications software provider that Intel has become a shareholder.

Sysgold began from a 1994 project to develop mobile technology to help Hewlett-Packard with its distribution business, allowing salespeople to spend more time with customers and less in the office. "The software functions like Legos, with standard modules that we assemble in association with the systems of the client. We have developed an end-to-end solutions methodology that puts clients in control," says Sysgold General Manager Fernando Plata.

The company invested $2 million over the last decade to grow the business and develop a suite of handheld computer tools necessary to expand throughout the region. A merger with Brazil's Spring Wireless is under way and Sysgold now posts annual sales of $45 million. It's looking to expand to Spain and even Russia.

Innovation helps overcome such geographical challenges. The Science Foundation for Life, a non-profit organization, overcame the odds six years ago to find a vaccine for piscirickettsia salmonis, a bacteria that effects 10% of Chile's farmed salmon and inflicts $100 million in losses a year on the industry.

The company faced the unenviable task of finding a vaccine against bacteria, which have many more proteins than viruses. The more proteins, the more difficult it is to devise a chemical to fight the ailment. The company was unable to use traditional vaccine sources because the bacteria do not exist in the Northern Hemisphere. "This was something that we had to do ourselves," says Pablo Valenzuela, the company's head of development.

With little knowledge about the bacteria available, the organization took a look at its genome to find a solution that could protect up to 95% of fish stocks. Following development costs of $2 million the product is now on the market. "Commercialization started this year with the vaccine licensed to the Swiss group Novartis for large scale production," says Valenzuela.

In addition to about 500,000 fish that need vaccination in Chile each year, the vaccine now has a potential market in Northern Hemisphere fisheries, where it has been reported the bug has spread, and not just in salmon species.

Sometimes you know you are onto something but can't quite put your finger on it. This was how Fernando Bascunan felt when he started breeding the Chilean brown garden snail Helix aspersa Muller in 1980 to ship to Europe for food. (The plan flopped on falling demand.) Yet, in 1988, Bascunan's son, a medical student, began to investigate why snail slime healed cuts on his hands quickly. Soon he was making snail cream. Today Bascunan harvests slime from 13,000 snails via a secret extraction process that he says doesn't hurt the snails. The slime contains collagen, elastin and glycolic acid, which Bascunan says helps to eliminate dead human skin cells and to generate new cells.

"The key was learning how to preserve the extract and maintain its properties," Bascunan says. Ironically, business grew at a snail's pace. Commercial production began in 1995 after a patent was obtained in Chile, but the product did not take off until it got exposure in international media in 1999 and the advent of the Internet created a low-cost sales channel through which snail cream's benefits could be communicated.

Bascunan's company, Cosmeticas Elicina, produces 35,000 40-gram units a month. "We estimate that for each unit we need eight snails," Bascunan says. The company sold $1.5 million in products last year, 60% of which were sold abroad in more than 20 countries. The company expects to grow by 25% a year.

Natural resources provide the starting block for many innovations. Brazil's coconut plantations often encounter problems disposing of shells, so the Federal University of Para found a way to turn discarded shells into car seats. With support from automobile giant DaimlerChrysler, the university developed a process in the 1990s to mix coconut fibers with rubber and shape them into components that can compete with ordinary foam.

Industrial production began in March 2001 following a $4 million investment, with products going to DaimlerChrysler, General Motors and Scania, a Swedish automobile company. "Coconut fiber has many advantages. It makes a more comfortable car seat, the seat takes up less space, and coconut fiber is ecologically a better product than foam," says Thomas Mitschein, the project's coordinator at the university.

"We use 20 tons of coconut fiber a month, which is about 200,000 coconuts," Mitschein says.

Iron man. Latin American innovation is often prompted by the need to replicate or improve on other technology from abroad. In Peru, Nova, a bakery products manufacturer, developed the best thing since sliced bread for the region's bakers by introducing an oven based on a foreign prototype. The final product cost $15,000 compared with the $60,000 a similar French import would cost.

Baking bread in cheaper ovens wasn't enough, says company owner Maximo San Roman. He attributes the success of the oven to its manufacturing process, which involves a type of iron with special additives developed by Nova. He claims it makes them the most efficient ovens in the world. "The iron provides a material with extra quality at no additional cost," San Roman says. With limited access to automated machines, the company harnesses the competence of Peru's skilled workers in the manufacturing process, which he says only adds to the quality.

Retailing cheaper than European competitors, Nova sells more than 800 standard ovens a year, has annual revenue of about $5 million, and has ovens installed in more than 20 countries, including the United States, San Roman says. Nova was recognized at an international baking-industry convention in Las Vegas in 2004 as the best bread-making equipment manufacturer.

With so many successful product launches, popping champagne corks has been the bane of the region's waiters. One Buenos Aires waiter, his hands raw from opening dozens of bottles one night in 2000, asked an inventor friend to develop an opener. Hugo Olivera accepted the challenge and one week later conceived of a device that slips over the bottleneck and, by squeezing a lever, extracts the cork.

Olivera and co-developer Eduardo Fernandez spent the next 18 months on the street, looking for venture capital. "We knocked on more than 30 doors and when eventually number 31 opened, we were in business. We were not only looking for money but also people who would commit themselves to the project," says Fernandez.

Production of the Descorjet opener started in mid-2002, following an initial investment of $260,000. Today, Descorjet produces 120,000 units annually at factories in Argentina and Taiwan. The company has narrowed its initial product range in response to market demand from 15 models to two; one gold plated and one silver plated, that retail for $45. "This is a premium product sold in the main sparkling-wine markets of Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand," Fernandez says.

PAUL HARRIS * SANTIAGO

Fast and Furious

Latin American companies pump out patents for global use.

           number of international
           patent filings (2005E)

   Brazil  283
   Mexico  136
 Colombia   27
Argentina   22
   Panama   18
     Cuba   14
    Chile   13
Venezuela    5
  Uruguay    4
  Ecuador    3

SOURCE: World Intellectual Property Organization

E = Estimate

Note: Table made from bar graph.