Well - They could have done better....
Managerspeak should have been minimized - Looks like All managers - give lot of Lip service to the Overused word "Innovation" - Yet when it comes to the real action - everyone without failure - talked about - " How whatever I am doing should be defined as Innovation". If you can't understand what I am doing is Innovation - then anyway you dont know what Innovation is.
Speaker after speaker after speaker ... told us why none of us understand Innovation and why his last XX years of work is nothing but Innovation.
Well it really esacpes me - the messages that we have been given -
However, in the summit following persons, their address and their presentations stand out - as examples of what should have been done by other speakers as well ....
Prof CNR Rao - He told plain truth. Innovation is what human beings are living throughout their centuries of evolution. Indian Commercial Organizations - having earned so much money by doing low-end "Coolie" work - need to act in exploring science and technology - education - Why there is not a single private world class university in India - why cant the Biggies create a university to enhance talent in science and technology rather than counting their Dollars by selling human labour - that happens to be cheaply available compared to other geos..... It was almost funny to see the big-wigs on the dias being made uncomfortable by the almost close to Nobel Prize - Prof Rao.
The Volvo presentation was very apt, clear, comprehensive and showed the ingenuity of creating resonance with the customer by highlighting your product features to meet the hidden needs. It was indeed the case when Volvo came to India and found their product could not be sold as the cost was 4 times the current options. They had to educate their customers - instead of Benefit assertion - they created resonance ....
The lady from Elephant Strategy+Design - the first commercial design firm out of Pune - gave her presentation during the evening dinner on 15th June. She gave an interesting perspectives to routes to Innovation - 8 possible routes based on her past work were nice abstraction of what the audience can ponder and use....
To me the best presentation came from Lakshmikant Goenka - the young Managing Director of Dolcera. It was indeed a fantastic exposition of what a set of young minds can do to create a niche in the young field of Information Visualization for Intelligence and Innovation. Using web 2.0 open source tools the company has created a capability to unclutter and create knowledge from the information de-coherence that we have created for ourselves. In this blog sometime back I wrote about an old paper of mine on Ubiquitous Decision Enabling Knowledge (UDEK). I see that vision possible now - with the platform provided by dolcera. Great Innovation, Dolcera - Alas the other bigwigs - the emminent speakers could not come anywhere near what he could do in his short presentation. Way to go Mr. Lakshmikant Goenka!
I realized the summits of CII will not create Innovations - it will be done by dolceras and Elephant Designs of India....
