What we can Learn from the House of Tata about Innovation

The Tata Group Innovation Forum and associated activities have been in place for about a decade now. Here is what we can learn from them....

A Tribute to Vidyanand Jha and Dheeraj Sanghi as they turn 50

This post is dedicated to two of my friends who just turned 50.

A Creative Persona

He was one of the first friends I made as a doctoral student at IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA) in 1991. Poet, film buff, supporter of the underdog, teacher of creativity, voracious reader, questioner of authority, former left activist, jazz enthusiast Vidyanand Jha celebrated his 50^th birthday recently.

As doctoral students at IIMA, we had to do many of the first year classes along with the MBA students. So, we were part of one of the sections of the MBA class, in the spacious amphitheatre-like classrooms for which IIMA is famous. We were seated towards the back, on the right hand side, with one MBA student between us.  But as far as I can recall, we were already friendly even before we were serendipitously seated so close to each other.

Several things stood out about Jha – his looks, his photo-chromatic glasses which helped him hide his eyes or even let him sleep while classes were in progress, the diversity of his experience compared to the typical MBA student! Many of our classmates had probably never heard of the CPI-ML, let alone been a member. I recall one occasion on which a professor asked how many students had a rural address, and Jha was the only one who put up his hand. Jha used to hang out with the senior, scholarly yet rebellious doctoral students who held forth on the philosophy of management thought and life.

While at IIMA, Jha and I used to attend every seminar we could. So, we got exposure to a wide variety of subjects and speakers. But, neither he nor I became great researchers in the traditional academic sense. I think we just enjoyed the exposure and the discussions.

As evidenced by his Facebook posts today, Jha is a member of multiple worlds. One is the world of Maithili literature. Jha is an accomplished poet himself, and has been published by the Sahitya Akademi. He has also translated books into Hindi. I tried to persuade him to translate my book From Jugaad to Systematic Innovation into Hindi but didn’t succeed in doing so. Maybe he would have done it if it were fiction. I often ask myself how strong is the dividing line between fiction and non-fiction – after all, even non-fiction is based on the lens through which you see things. But, may be Jha doesn’t see it that way.

Jha has been a member of the faculty at IIM Calcutta since he finished FPM at IIMA. Kolkata has always been the gateway to the east, and his location has helped him remain in close contact with his home. He has also become a fluent speaker of Bengali. Kolkata has a good number of literary and cultural events, and it’s a clear sign of Jha’s cultural interests that he has managed to attend these in spite of the fact that IIMC is miles away from the centre of town. That’s quite unlike many contemporary management academics who lead a much more sequestered life.

Over the time I have known him, Jha has been a compulsive giver, particularly of macabre films. But the fun part is that he doesn’t see them as violent or offensive. Maybe that just comes from being a writer and a film buff.

Many years ago, in an article in EPW, Ramachandra Guha bemoaned the loss of the bilingual intellectual. Guha spoke too soon – Jha can be an intellectual in Maithili, Hindi and Bengali in addition to English! But if I have one regret, it’s that Jha (like many other Indian scholars) has been more in the Indian oral tradition than a great writer as far as management is concerned. From talking to him, and seeing the feedback of his students, I can see that he has lots of interesting insights into management and organizations, but few of these have found their way into print.

Reflecting his left leanings, Jha has always been quick to take the side of the underdog. I can remember one warm afternoon many summers ago when he and another friend of ours derided the IT industry for creating cybercoolies.

A Change-Maker

Another friend who turned 50 recently, is an equally weighty academic. Dheeraj Sanghi was technically one batch junior to me at IIT Kanpur, but we graduated in the same year as he did a 4-year BTech, and I did a 5-year integrated MSc programme.

I got to know Dheeraj thanks to another friend, Pramath Sinha. We were building our team for the Cultural Festival and Pramath brought in Dheeraj to manage our finances. Dheeraj was active in student politics , and so was I, but I got to know him well only after he became a member of our Festival team (he did a great job!).

After a PhD at Maryland, Dheeraj returned to our alma mater and has been a faculty member there ever since. Like Jha, Dheeraj is also a straight talker, and not one given to excessive diplomacy and tact. But he has been fiercely loyal to IITK and has put tremendous effort into sustaining its best traditions. As Dean of Academic Affairs over the last few years, he was an enthusiastic innovator, with all his efforts directed towards helping IITK achieve the best academic standards.

Dheeraj has never been afraid to experiment. He took a couple of years off to head the LN Mittal Institute of Technology in Jaipur, and though I couldn’t visit him during that stint, from what he told me it is clear he managed to try out a lot of new things there as well.

Dheeraj just moved to IIIT Delhi for a couple of years. IIIT Delhi already has a creative leader at its helm. But Pankaj Jalote should watch out, Dheeraj will soon be ready to unleash his ideas there as well.

Dheeraj’s commitment to engineering education has been evident from his blog. He has waded into controversial issues like the two-stage JEE process with gusto and has always managed to provide very logical and thought-provoking analyses.

One of Dheeraj’s other passions has been the Indian Railways. He travels long distances (by train, of course) to attend conferences of other rail buffs like himself. He explores the myriad options available on the IRCTC ticketing website, sometimes landing up in all sorts of trouble as a result, and he then has to valiantly try to recover his money using various clauses of the Railway manual.

I am surprised that Dheeraj hasn’t figured in the recent round of IIT director appointments. Maybe he is too outspoken. But, time is on his side, and I hope the country will take advantage of his energy and vast reservoir of ideas to build one of our institutions.

It’s been my privilege to know Jha and Dheeraj. As they cross 50, here’s wishing them many more years of creative endeavours.

Lessons from Jagdish Sheth on what it takes to be a management guru

Jagdish Sheth's autobiography - The Accidental Scholar - gives useful insights into what it takes to become a management guru. More here

Creating a Distinctive Identity for Indian Management Education

How should the Indian B-school and MBA program of 2015 be distinctive? And what can our business education offer to the rest of the world? These are two questions that flashed across my mind as I attended MBA Universe’s Asian Management Conclave (AMC) at Singapore recently.

For my answers to these questions, read this. 

VidyaGyan: Allowing Indian Talent to Flower and Bloom

The Shiv Nadar Foundation's VidyaGyan schools bring the best school education to bright students who can't afford it.

My latest post on VidyaGyan is available here

Making Inclusive Innovation Work

[This week's post is a continuation from last week's post - insights from the Inclusive Innovation conference held at Rashtrapati Bhavan.]

Funding Innovation

Funding of innovation is always a challenge, and one that different countries solve in different ways.

Gilles G. Patry, President & CEO spoke about how the Canada Foundation for Innovation has invested over a billion dollars in state-of-the-art facilities at universities across Canada to help them do world-class research. The Foundation funds upto 40% of the project cost and focuses on partnerships. He suggested that the model is largely successful. The evidence? -  Canada punches above its weight on research and accounts for 5% of impactful research papers [sorry, I can’t recall exactly how this was measured or over which period.]

For me, one of the big attractions of the Round Table was the participation of Nobel Laureate and Grameen Bank founder Mohammed Yunus. For someone who has brought revolutionary ideas like microfinance to the world, he was surprisingly skeptical about the availability of finance.  According to Yunus, the sector needing the largest innovations is the finance sector! Professor Yunus drew our attention to what he considered the biggest achievement of Grameen Bank - in savings and not in lending! He estimated that the Grameen Bank had contributed to more than $2B savings so far.

A German participant pointed out that money is available for impact investment but not enough social enterprises are available to absorb this investment. But, other participants were skeptical of Impact investing, citing a conflict between the social mission of the enterprise and the investor’s desired outcomes

Anil Gupta said the ecosystem should support both managed innovation and spontaneous innovation. He stressed the need for both a sanctuary model  that has chaos inside and order outside and an incubator model  that has chaos outside and order inside.

Making Social Innovation Work

Several useful ideas emerged on this theme:

One participant made an interesting observation – most people today recognize 1000 corporate logos but fewer than 10 plant species. Parag Anand of the School of Planning & Architecture (SPA) at Delhi came up with at least one solution to this problem – the SPA organizes tours for student immersion as user experience is critical to social innovation.

Iyer from the Mumbai-based Indian Foundation for Development (IFD) spoke about the need for tinkering rooms/workshops in schools as also innovation exchange programmes. The IFD has started 185 balagurukuls that host 12500 children, and there is a need to expose them to creativity and innovation.

Anil Gupta advocated the Indian concept of samavedana – making others’ pain your own, or empathetic innovation.

Mohammed Yunus suggested targeting waste. He said that at least one out of every 6 pairs of shoes bought by customers is not worn. Can’t these be re-channelised to the poor? Can’t cloth rejected by textile mills also be used?

Some participants wondered how existing innovations could be spread or diffused better. Reaching the market is often difficult. Anil Gupta gave an interesting example of four machine tool start-ups in Ghazaiabad/Faridabad that started a common marketing company so that together they would have a broad enough catalogue and a large enough volume of products to justify marketing expenditures.

Grameen Bank uses the joint venture route to solve new problems and reach users. For example, it has a joint venture with BASF for treated mosquito nets, and uses the Grameen Bank channel including self-help groups to reach users. The scientist from LBNL advocated coming up with innovations that the corporate sector will embrace.

Corporate Sector vs. Social Sector

In fact, the liveliest debates were about the role of the corporate sector and the social sector.  Lines were clearly drawn with some people like this scientist clearly preferring market-based solutions and others clearly distrusting the private sector to do anything beyond enriching itself. The word “trust” figured in many of these discussions.

Solomon Darwin of the University of California at Berkeley pointed out that while open innovation is a 2-way street involving ideas flowing both outside in and inside out, corporations have tended to focus only on the former. He pronounced that the world of high margins is over though I wonder how this can be completely true when Apple is sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars amassed through huge margins.

One of the most engaged participants in the Round Table was Jin Hyo Joseph Yun of South Korea. One could almost see his mind working as he tried to relate what he had seen in the exhibition to the discussion in the conference room! He tried to build a model on the fly – volunteers are needed to connect technology to society/market but virtuous big business is needed to make it commercially successful.

Stuart Hart cited Polanyi to make a point that was in one of his articles - production has got disembedded from the social world. People have come to distrust the business process. There is a need to re-embed economic activity in society, that is to build business models that create mutual value.

Mukesh Puri, Secretary Higher & Technical Education, Government of Gujarat believed that successful innovations have to be owned by the people . The perceived benefits need to be clear. He cited Pravesh Utsav, a celebration held at the time of girls joining school in Class 1 All political figures participate. He said that the drop-out rate has declined as a result.

Conclusion

It is ironic that innovation which is inherently an integrative activity is today impeded by silos. These silos are reinforced by different philosophies and worldviews. We may have to rely on other forces at work to lower these walls. Take the new requirement of compulsory CSR activity by Indian companies – this is forcing companies to work more closely with NGOs and other social organizations. Hopefully, this will create an environment in which companies and NGOs recognize each others’ worth, and lead to collaborative and inclusive innovation in the future.

[This blog has been written based on notes taken by the author. These have not been re-checked with the speakers. Views expressed are those of the individuals and do not necessarily represent the institutions they work for.]

Revisiting Inclusive Innovation: Notes from a Recent Roundtable

The practice of inviting outstanding grassroot innovators to the majestic environs of Rashtrapati Bhavan, the home of India’s head of state, was started by President APJ Abdul Kalam when he was president. It’s a tribute to the rootedness of our national leaders and the persistence of Drs. Anil Gupta and RA Mashelkar that the practice has not only continued but been reinforced over time. This year, the event evolved into a week-long “Festival of Innovations” with award ceremonies, workshops and roundtables.

Under the Tent…

The centre of the festival was a huge temporary structure pitched on the Rashtrapati Bhavan Football Grounds that had exhibits and demonstrations of all the award-winning innovations. The innovators must have been encouraged by the large crowds in the hall, even though the main destination of the crowds was the famed Mughal Gardens, thrown open to the public at this time every year.

The innovations themselves were not very different from earlier grassroot innovations that I have seen, at least in terms of the categories they represented. The most prominent was mechanical devices to do tasks that would otherwise be done manually. Many of these were focused on farm operations but some were on health and sanitation. Devices to help people with disabilities, and improved agricultural varieties were other important categories.

Some of the impressive innovations included a modified walker that enables climbing stairs, interlocking bricks, and wearing a helmet as an ignition switch for a motorcycle.

The centre of the hall had banners with quotations on innovation, largely from Anil Gupta and Mashelkar. Truth be said though, there weren’t many people reading these banners, and I wonder how many people would have appreciated the nuances of the quotes even if they had read them!

The innovators themselves were present, and many of them were peppered with questions by enthusiastic visitors. I imagine this must have been motivating for them, though by the end of the day they must have been exhausted!

But, if the purpose of the event was to recognize and encourage innovators from all corners of our country, and to underline the democratic idiom of innovation (“Anyone can innovate”), I am sure this event served its purpose.

…. And Inside the Conference Room

Inside the newly constructed Rashtrapati Bhavan Cultural Centre with its high ceilings and ornate decorations (including larger than life size portraits of all India’s presidents till date), innovation experts from all over the world conferred about the future of inclusive innovation. 

What are the problems to solve?

If you read our book 8 Steps to Innovation, you might remember that we advocated creating a challenge book of the most pressing problems that are literally crying for innovation. One piece of good news is that the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Institute for GloballyTransformative Technologies has identified the fifty most important global problems to solve with technology. These include low-cost desalination to make drinking water available at a reasonable cost; a DNA-based diagnostic for accurate detection of tuberculosis; an integrated “clinic-in-a-box” for maternal and child care; low-cost homes for the urban poor; and a very timely point-of-use DNA-based rape kit to enable timely collection of evidence against perpetrators of rape.

Of course, there are solutions searching for problems as well. The co-founder of the notion of the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP), Stuart Hart drew attention to the wealth of “shelf technologies” in universities. At Cornell alone he reported that the university found about 4,000 technologies / patents that had not been exploited.

Anshu Gupta, founder of Goonj had a different take on problems. He argued that there are many “non-issues” that need to be made issues. Clothing is important, as important as food and shelter. Why can’t clothing also be a parallel currency? Earlier clothing was only part of disaster relief and charity. Why can’t cloth be given for work?

Anshu pointed out the importance of clothing by reminding the audience that more people die due to cold in winter than due to other calamities.

Drawing attention to another “non-issue” that needs to become an issue, he said that 88% of women don’t have access to sanitary napkins.

How to solve the problems?

Hart advocated an intermingling of what he called “exponential technologies” with traditional ones to address the problems of people at the BoP.

But, going back to the exhibition for a moment, it’s interesting to reflect that there were hardly any “modern” technologies like electronics or computers on display in any of the exhibits. The only such device in use was the mobile phone, and even this was in very small numbers.

An earnest NRI from a US lab had a different take on this. While he felt that India should continue to build world class R&D institutions, he thought that solutions may be available more quickly if the government were to subsidize private sector R&D or, more radically, “reverse outsource” critical problems to western research centres. What he was suggesting here is that the Indian government commission (say) a Pfizer or a Merck to come up with a new cure for tuberculosis and make it worth their while by underwriting all the research expenses. But I really wonder whether that’s a business model they would be interested in; what could work though is for the government to give a research contract to one or more outstanding academic or research laboratories abroad.

Brock from the UNICEF Innovation Centre underlined the importance of design with the user rather than for the user. He emphasized that design should be for scale, and that an organization liked UNICEF should embrace open standards (not open source) since a public organization should embrace public goods.

But, he admitted that there was a need to change their mindset from seeing the private sector only as suppliers to working with grassroot innovators as partners.

I spoke about the importance of government procurement, and policies regarding standards in making social innovation work. Rigid standards designed with existing technologies and suppliers in mind can keep out important innovations. Pre-qualification clauses can act as barriers to entry. The government sometimes encourages imitation without respecting intellectual property. And tender procedures prevent government from procuring things that might have been developed specifically for the government. Instead, the government should play a more positive and proactive role in supporting inclusive innovation.

How do you make Inclusive Innovation work?

To conclude this piece and share the key takeaways, please visit this space next week….

[This blog has been written based on notes taken by the author. These have not been re-checked with the speakers. Views expressed are those of the individuals and do not necessarily represent the institutions they work for.]