The new me - by Ashank Reddy - my new friend and colleague

PLEASE TELL WHICH ONE IS NOT LIKE ME!

Managing Intellectual Property: A practical workshop for Entrepreneurs

Managing Intellectual Property: A practical workshop for Entrepreneurs

http://www.nsrcel.org/home/files/Managing%20Intellectual%20Property_2009.pdf

Dear All,

Above is an information link on a practical workshop on Intellectual Property.

We from Crafitti (http://www.crafitti.com) will be conducting TRIZ based Patent analysis module besides the modules on leveraging patent information.

I thought it may be of interest to some of your colleagues and you.

Look forward to seeing you at the workshop,

with warm regards,

Navneet

Building a Learning Organization – Is that an Oxymoron?

The natural structure we socialize through is a network. This has become evident with the research on social networks as exemplified by the discovery of small world phenomenon. Yet, the way our enterprises have been designed are predominantly hierarchical. Further, knowledge and information work has taken a central position in various businesses. The new world is being re-engineered at such a frantic pace that the organizations are failing to learn, adapt and leverage their expertise. There are unresolved challenges in increasing the learning capability and generation of new ideas in large organizations. These challenges as reflected in the inherent complexity of technology adoption and development, people dependencies and aspirations, infant processes, nebulous understanding of information worker productivity, increasing disconnect between customer needs versus customer wants, globally distributed work and rapid technology churn, combine to produce radically different needs for an organization.

We propose that the organization design should cater for organizational innovation in creating multiple routes to idea fructification. The organization structure should be naturally evolved or designed for continuous learning as a route to innovation. This should include retaining implicit and explicit knowledge, reducing idea to fructification time, enabling experimentation as a route to innovation, tinkering and retaining tinkering knowledge, and enable personal growth, training and career aspirations of employees. In this regard we need to combine inputs from social network analysis, word of mouth marketing, and network science to define and describe a framework for building a learning organization to take care of challenges of the new complexities.

Evolution and Development –

Evolution Chance Randomness Variety/Many Possibilities Uniqueness Uncertainty Accident Bottom-up Divergent Differentiation

Development Necessity Determinism Unity/One Constraints Sameness Predictability Design (self-organized or other) Top-Down Convergent Integration

This is a slide taken from web – I forgot from where I took – so apologies to the original creator!

Social Networks and the Making Ideas Happen in Large Enterprises – My Mother’s Recipe

My mother is an author - a poetess and story writer. She also has been a teacher. Till recently I was unaware of the method, the process or technique that has helped her find stories and characters for her writings. She has this remarkable ability to make friends with people – new acquaintances, strangers, seniors, young people – it doesn’t matter. She can connect with everyone. More surprisingly I have seen most people connect with her as well. I have always wondered how when she meets someone for the first time, she easily gets into knowing where from the person is, what does the person do, etc. Besides a genuine interest in people, one common method that invariably helps her to connect, is to mention someone’s name who or whose acquaintance has some connection to the new person she is talking to. There is a continuous search in her mind to connect the new person with someone whom she already knows. It is remarkable to see her confidence in knowing that she will find someone whom she is already connected to and who in turn is connected to the new person.

Till recently what I did not know is the fact that she naturally understands the way we connect with each other. She knows we are all connected to each other. It is after all a small world that we have. All of us are actually connected to each other through just six hops or six degrees only. The recent social networks research gives insights into hitherto unexplained observations.

 

The Small World, Six Degrees and Tipping Points

In mid-sixties Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist teaching at Harvard, with a reputation of doing original experiments, conducted an innocuous experiment which by his standards was rather boring to say the least. He asked 160 volunteers to send a letter to his stockbroker friend in Boston. The only condition was to send the letters not directly to the stockbroker but to their own friends, whom the volunteers think are most likely to know the stockbroker. Each of the friends was asked to send this further in the same manner.

Surprisingly, the letters arrived to the stock broker in an average six-hops or six-degrees. This led to the notion of six-degrees and of small world – that all of us are connected to each other by six intermediate connections. We all are connected to a small subset of people, which is true. It is also a fact that each of our connections is not mutually exclusive. They connect with each other as well. In effect, our connections are clustered. This leads to a problem, world can’t be both – a small world and a clustered one.

Despite being clustered in our own links, we connect with other such clusters through random, long-range, infrequent, and weak ties. The sociologist Mark Granovetter in his now classic paper of 1973 titled Strength of Weak Ties showed that effective social coordination happens through the presence of occasional weak ties between individuals and not through densely interlocking strong ties.

The small world, weak ties and network effects were looked at from a different perspective by Malcolm Gladwell. In his book that introduced Tipping Point to the mainstream language, Gladwell seeks to explain social epidemics or sudden and often chaotic changes from one state to another. The tipping point refers to the moment when something unusual becomes common.

According to Gladwell, three types of actors combine to create idea tipping points. Connectors are those with wide social circles. Mavens are knowledgeable people. Salesmen are charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They exert soft influence rather than forceful power. Gladwell says besides the few people – mavens, connectors and salesmen - there are two other factors that play an important role in idea tipping. These are Stickiness - ideas or products found attractive or interesting by others will grow exponentially for some time and The Power of Context - human behavior is strongly influenced by external variables of context.

Despite the work of Milgram, Granovetter and tipping point framework offered by Gladwell, the social networks remained more of a curiosity rather than serious field to pursue. It was only the research work of Duncan Watts that has brought the small world and clustered networks together with a mathematical recipe to design a social network which combines the randomness needed for small world and order needed for clustering.

Large enterprises are characterized by large social networks. We need to build a framework for making ideas happen in the social networks of large enterprises. After all, our most important world is the world of connections at our work place. How to design an enterprise based on the profound results of the recent groundbreaking research from social networks? May be my MOTHER’s RECIPE is the key!

Upload PIZC (passion, imagination, zest and creativity)

Thomas L Friedman says,


"You cannot download passion, imagination, zest and creativity -- all that stuff that will make you untouchable. You have to upload it, the old fashioned way, under the olive tree, with reading, writing and arithmetic, travel, study, reflection, museum visits and human interaction."

How India as a Nation Innovates?

1. Late 1980's India was denied Supercomputer from Cray called Cray XMP or Cray YMP, by so called control regimes. By early 1990's India has built three big supercomputers - Param, Pace and Flowsolver!

2. The Agni Missile (the IRBM) India developed on its own only because everyone denied to sell the Missile Systems to India

3. The Cryogenic Engine which propels India's GSLV (Space Vehicle) was denied to us - we developed on our own

4. The Sub- Kilo Tonnes Nuclear weapons tests that India did in 1998 were our own only because these were not available to us from any source.

Inference: In India the Buy Vs Build decisions will always favor Buy if the buy option is available. Only when the option to buy is not there, or doors are closed, we will build on our own.

If we need to create innovators/entrepreneurs in India we may need to take away the option of cool - well paying jobs at MNCs which make most of us complacent and happy in the status-quo.

When Jobs are lost, when sudden realization hits that people dont have any other option - entrepreneurs will emerge - it is "back-to-the wall option".

To change this - we need to make our family system and education system in a manner to incorporate that Entrepreneurship is the first option much ahead of any type of Jobs, not the current IITs/IIMs, IT, IAS, etc - starting your own firm doesnt come into picture at all!

Thinking Change is not easy - but this is needed at all levels!