Focusing on Innovation as a major milestone in India’s road ahead fostering innovation in the academic environment in business & technology in fine arts and the transition from innovation to entrepreneurship to enterprise are the key topics of Innovation track.
The first day Dec 19 saw the first session titled ‘Innovation & Entrepreneurship’ – this session dealt with innovation in the context of how it leads to entrepreneurship and how this can be facilitated.
The session was chaired by Prof L S Ganesh Deptt of Mgmt Studies at IIT Madras and moderated by Gunjan Bagla Managing Director of Amritt Inc.. Prof Ganesh started the session by welcoming everyone and thanked everyone the hall was almost full for choosing it be at this session instead of 5 other parallel sessionsJ.
He then requested Gunjan to take over and give the directions to the group of distinguished speakers. Gunjan Bagla who is also the next incoming PanIIT USA President welcomed the audience and briefly introduced him before requesting the 1st Keynote speaker to present his views on Innovation.
Dr M S Krishnan Professor Business Information Technology U Michigan was the 1st keynote speaker at the Innovation track. Dr Krishnan is the co-author of his new book ‘The New Age of Innovation’ which he authored with C K Prahalad. As the key part of his book Dr Krishnan talked about their research on major business trends which are happening across the globe and how they are applicable to any business:
Ubiquitous Connectivity – very soon over 4 billion people are going to be connected through various devices Pervasiveness of digital technologies Convergence of technology – e.g. is iPhone a Phone PC Camera or a Music Player?
Emergence of Social Networks
He briefly shared his views on how these business trends are demanding new approaches to wealth creation. Talking on the same he gave two equations on which their booked is revolved around.
· N typically used to signify sample space = 1 Experience – it means that “value is based on unique personalized experiences of consumers.” That is even companies serving 100 million consumers need to focus on individuals. E.g. Google search allows millions of people to have their own unique and personalized page.
· R = G which means Resources = Global. In other words companies’ internal focus should be on gaining access to resources not necessarily owning them. Social networks are example of the same
R. Subramanian CEO of Subhiksha the next keynote speaker of the Innovation track started his session by saying that there is too much hype created about Entrepreneurship – people are not present to the real world they have fancy notions about it. While talking to different opportunities for Innovation he highlighted the key idea behind the emergence & success of Subhiksha – Grocery Discounting which didn’t exist earlier. Talking on the same he shared how relevant and valuable was discounting medicines for the massed in India especially the old age people for whom the cost of Medicare was ever increasing.
For the budding entrepreneurs he stated that while developing a business idea they should look at how your product or service is going to add value to the customer – directly or indirectly e.g. grocery discounting by Subhiksha forced its competitors to follow the same. In his view in the next 5 – 10 years India will have an opportunity to export its retailing best practices to the rest of the world.
The distinguished panelists followed the key speakers and presented their views & shared their experiences on Innovation & Entrepreneurship.
Last updated: July 9th, 2024
