Wired Magazine creates a wonderful Disruptive by Design conference. The Last one was held on 14th June 2010 and streamed live by fora.tv. Some exciting speakers were talking about some big ideas that are going to change the world. Few of the talks that caught attention were by Chris Anderson, Mark Pinkus and Clay Shirkey. Some exciting world changing ideas from these talks.

Chris Anderson started of the day with how our world is changing the manufacturing industry. The bid idea of the talk is 3D printing tools are democratizing the tools and the web the distribution of creative designs in manufacturing industry. Now it is possible to create a digital file of a physical object and then order a high precision production object in numbers of 10,100 or 10,000. No longer is the creation of innovative and inspired designs under the clutches of 100k order by big manufacturing companies. It brings power to the individual to create a new design of a motor vehicle, a new design for construction, a new design home furnishing and get it manufactured in exactly the number that is needed by the designer or customer demand for it. Now how does this compare even 50 years ago. Suppose you are a highly technical inventor, if you invent a new windshield wiper, then the only path to the market is to patent the invention and hand over the license of manufacturing to a big factory. here the inventor's interest's are usually subsumed by those of the manufacturing company. But now the inventor has the power to build a 3D prototype at a very affordable price and then order online and with a few click on sites like alibaba , the exact number of copies of his model and reach the market. This means that inventors can become entrepreneurs , with the power of low cost tools and social models of distribution over the web.

The Internet changed the way people create and consume information by democratizing the tools for creation and also creating a platform for distribution of created written works through the web. The same pattern of low cost tools of creation with 3d printers and social models of distribution, such as ponoko have created more power to talented individual designers to reach the market.

Mark Pinkus, Zynga CEO had excellent view of social capital. Having given lot of thought on how people value social capital and the latent need the people have to play with their friends did show some remarkable vision. When people were asking him that Zynga does only facebook games, they did not get the vision of the founder. He did compare the latent need of people wanting to play with their friends with the latent need of search people had before google. Pretty remarkable to have a vision of social games and social capital to building a multi million dollar company, shows excellent grasp of latent needs and using a platform where people spend a lot of time to create games that create social capital.

June 20, 2010

The Design of Business by Roger Martin

The Design of Business on Prezi

April 23, 2010

Insightful startups + billion dollar Innovations

Entrepreneurs, who are they and what they do? This is a question that has been at the back of my mind for a long time. The closest answer to this is "Entrepreneurs create and exploit change".The guru of modern management Peter Drucker once famously said "Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service". Innovation, Change and Entrepreneurs are the forces that drive the engine of our global economy forward. Every successful country needs entrepreneurs to grow and prosper.

The key insight about founders is that they are able to create successful business by identifying opportunities, challenging assumptions, leveraging limited resources and by being creative. Now, most folks can pick up these skills, some of the founders are naturally talented in combining all the four traits. Identifying opportunities is a key skill, i.e. you can look at problems and stick with the status quo or you can look at a billion strong population of India as Captain Gopinath has done and create a low cost air lines. Guy Kawasaki says "you will never have infinite resources", this rings true at startups and at big firms. Startups by using limited resources and by being creative, are able to chase out-sized goals and get out-sized results.

Some of the most innovative startups in recent years have been Threadless, ZipCar, BetterPlace, Kiva, Flip video recorder, Etsy, Zappos, Zoho, Mint.com and Skype. The amount of value created by these firms, in their first few years is phenomenal. If you look close enough at each of these startups, they bring a new innovation to the market. From creating an ease of use in recording HD video, enabling electric vehicles and pay-as-you-go model for urban transport, to connecting donors and entrepreneurs in third world countries. They are also democratizing hand made goods and customer service. These are the innovations, that startups have brought to the market and created hundreds of millions in value.

What is common between Apple iPod, Nintendo Wii and Indian Premier League? Each is a billion dollar innovation. Each of these are outside-in innovation, i.e the market need for these innovations were always there and these firms were the first to tap into this market. It is very interesting to note how each innovation has become a billion dollar innovation. While Apple made buying and listing to music easy, Nintendo Wii created a new market for non-gamers, folks who had never played console games started playing. IPL brought club ownership and a professional national league, which combined innovative format of T20,great content with top notch marketing.

These startups prove that innovation and filling a market need, are the tools of entrepreneurs in creating value for their employees, stakeholders and society at large. The future belongs to people, who can imagine a better world and create organizations that make their vision come true. Entrepreneurs ask themselves, what is the change they would like to see in the world and make it happen. Opportunities to create value and create a better world are still wide open and its in our hands to make it happen.

April 23, 2010

Roger Martin's Insightful talk on Design Thinking at Bangalore

On a chilly tuesday evening, the Dean of Rotman school of Management - Roger L. Martin gave a talk about his new book at Bangalore International center,Bangalore. The book is called The Opposable Mind.

The talk was scheduled at 6.45 pm and the hall was filling up with many leaders of Bangalore. I expected a young crowd to be preset, but to my surprise more than half of the visitors were over 40 or 50 years old. Many leaders of B-schools, Business and professions such as Architecutre were present to listen to the talk about Leadership.

I was first of all intreguied, about what could, a Professor with degree from Harvard Business school have to offer to old and battle worn people sitting in the hall, to my delight he had some very insightfull ideas to share with us.

He mentioned, that he interviewed around 50 leaders of businesses and found remarkable similarity of thinking in most of the successful leaders. There are lots of books out there that talk about, how a particular leader was successful, but this Professor Roger mentions is mostly based on context. what does "Based on Context" mean?, it means that, if you find yourself in exactly the same situation as the one mentioned in the how-i-did-it books, the advise there might not be very helpfull to you, in you present circumstance.

So his work focuses on how these leaders think and not a how-to get same results book.

Next, he mentioned a what the opposable mind means, he drew his inspiration from opposable thumbs that humans have accuired that has give us an evolutionary advantage in survival. So the opposable mind is...

have the predisposition and the capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads, [and that they are] able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.

Professor then goes on to explain how we are thought in our education system to just work with models and not come up with creative solutions.

Here are a few interesting points

He defined success very well - the results that are got , to the actions that you have taken undertaken. i.e You are successful if you get the results that you set out to acheive.
Leaders have high aspirations and are highly successful.
Mastery and originality are the indicators of successful leaders. i.e in the long run, you get good at what you do - Mastery. But it is Originality that is mark of great leaders. Example: Piccaso. So ask your self every week end - Did i do something original?
The main purpose of leaders is to come up with creative solutions to models that are contradictory. A very good example he gave was of, ICICI chairman Kamalnath, he had to choose between growing the bank abroad by M&A , or growing locally in India. To his Kamalnath decided to grow with Indian dispora abroad. This was Integrative thinking.

This made lot of sense to me. The Opposable mind, is one of the finest business books that i have come to know of late. The Design of Business is the latest book by Roger Martin.

April 10, 2010

Idea Validation by Sanjay Swamy, former CEO of mChek at Startup Saturday

On a crisp Saturday morning of April 2010, around fifty people made their way to an office in the periphery of Bangalore to listen to a talk by an accomplished founder, who has taken a dominant position the mobile payments space in India.

The theme of the talk was Idea Validation, but Sanjay Swamy painted a broader picture than just Idea Validation. His current success of becoming the largest provider of mobile payments in India, which is the fastest growing mobile market in the world is quite remarkable. Founded in 2006 and targeting more than 15 million customers by 2010 tells us aobut mChek's growth story.It was really remarkable to finally meet a person, who put a complete picture of what entrepreneurship is and how one does actually go about doing a startup.

The first thing to strike my mind was, here was an executive, who was talking about how his thought process was, rather than a perfect twenty twenty hindsight story, that is told by most successful founders. his first slide was "Not every problem is a solved problem", i.e. just because a problem was solved by some one else, it does not mean that one cannot solve the same problem in a better way. This is how most entrepreneurs think, "there has got to be a better way". The whole approach to a startup or the essence of a company could be decided in either of the two ways. one is, finding a big problem and trying to solve it, second is when an idea strikes you. Now validating an idea that is based on a problem that you can see is much easier than trying to validate an idea that just strikes you as better way. Now how does one know, if an idea strikes you and it is a viable business idea. It could be that you are trying to do something and you find it very hard to do it. You could be searching for something for two to three hours on Google and you say to yourself, "I can't believe that nobody has solved this" or "there has got to be a better way".

The moment when the idea for mCheck was formed in Sanjay's mind was, in 2003 he was traveling by rickshaw and he asked the driver what time it was, the driver instead of looking at a watch, removed his cellphone and told time. This was the moment of epiphany when he realized that mobile phones would become part of almost every Indian's life and mobile transactions would be needed. his thought was "Some day every one will be making payments with cellphones". His main value proposition was that mobile payments between two untrusted parties would need an intermediary to establish trust between them to enable the transaction.

The next most interesting thing that he told was, how to pick from one of the many moments of epiphany/ideas most founders have. The solution is that you have to be consumed by the idea, if you think about the idea night and day, it then consumes you . Does the idea keep coming back to you and does it haunt you. Does it make you think on how you would go about implementing it. then you have got a likely winner. This also means that you are way ahead of what most people are thinking about currently. Being ahead of most people could be that they laugh at you, as most people did in the pre dot com days when Sanjay wanted to launch a service for sharing new born baby pics. This was even before baby.com domain was available and a similar service was later sold for 110 million dollars. So being ahead of conventional thinking at the time, can greatly help entrepreneurs.

The next most insight full thought was that "The amount of crap you have to clean is huge". i.e Acting on your idea and doing that things necessary to make it happen will involve a lot tasks that most people would not be willing to do. i.e you need to clean huge amounts of crap in getting that idea into shape. Also if you think you have only some easy tasks that are junk, it is then that other junk will hit you. Now why is this point important, it is important, as this tasks that nobody are willing to do, actually open up opportunities for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are willing to clean huge amount of junk in getting an idea into action.

There was a question from the audience about how does one know the major trend or growth will pan out with in the lifetime of the startup or funding runs out. It was the most insightful answer I had heard in a long time. Now to answer this, think about the UID project being done by Government of India. It is a system to track all transactions of an Individual with the Government and each person in India would get an unique ID. Something like SSN in US. So the entrepreneur has an idea or oppertunity to build services on top of UID. He can look at the trend and say that in 2 months I can start building applications on top of the platform. But the underlying platform gets delayed by 6 months, now what happens is that you end with 10 other companies trying to do the same service, as it got delayed and more people got aware of the opportunity. So it is a risk the entrepreneur has to take by investing early and then trying to capture more of the gains. Higher the risk, higher the reward. One has to scale the investments with the expected events, so that you still in the game and it does not wipe you out if the external events do not pan out.

some of the memorable quotes in a single sentences from the talk are
* Worry about success, as running a company is not just fun
* Take money from someone you don't know, as it might strain your relationship
* You should estimate or know when your cash flow is positive
* what is the path your startup will take toward becoming self sustaining in terms of time and steps.
* Be honest with what it will require.
* Don't be scared of others failure, but don't ignore them. Reach out and ask them why they failed.
* Some times problems appear much more huge than they actually are
* it is those companies that were early and executed well that have gone on to become hugely successful

The talk was conclude by saying that one has to just take the leap, jump off the cliff and has to just do it.