Business Innovation for MSME’s
15 September 2009
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Innovation
Elephantversity Institute of Innovation along with Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industries & Agriculture(MCCIA) organized a day long workshop on 'Business Innovation for MSME's" on 9th September in Pune.
The workshop was aimed specially towards Micro Small & Mediaum Enterprises (MSME's). It covered MSME's, those who are supplying to other businesses (OEM's) & also to those who make their own products. The challenge for the workshop focused on the issue 'how Industry could Innovate in a turbulent economy'.
Ashish Deshpande, Partho Guha, (Founder Director of Elephant Strategy+Design) along with Hrridaysh Deshpande (Director, Elephantversity Institute of Innovation) shared several strategies & tools for developing new user centric product from strategy to prototype to relevant Business model. Anna Muoio (Principle Social Innovation, Continuum, USA) also briefed participants about Innovation & Design thinking.
The issues covered in the workshop included innovation framework, understanding users, interactive ideation & prototyping and business model & strategy development.
Ashish Deshpande holding the session
Partho Guha briefing the Participants about the exercise
Participants Prototyping
Participants explaining their concepts
The participating entrepreneurs & managers of MSME's equipped themselves with necessary knowledge, tools & the confidence to Innovate. As we at Elephant Strategy + Design & Elephantversity believes ‘Everyone Can Innovate’.
Posted by Partho Guha
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What is ‘Design Research?’
28 November 2008
,
Innovation
Design research is broadly qualitative and focuses on discovering latent needs and desire of people within a given context. The insights from this research are actionable and help organizations to create meaningful products, services and communication.
Need for ‘Design Research’
Design always centers on the user. The effort to understand user/ people in their specific context is very much the part of the design process. Ability to go deep and capture real needs and desires of the users and turn them into actionable specification is the key to any successful design.
Studying people is possibly more art than science. There are lots of methods, borrowed from Market research, Ethnography, Psychology, Statistic, and other proven data capturing and analysis process. But the real key is empathy of the researcher towards the subject. The intuitive capability to pick up latent issues which are almost invisible and to rigorously investigate them to turn them into insights makes it unique.
Design Research also identifies certain patterns of behaviors, needs and desires which can evolve as Trends in the future. Understanding Trends among users and aligning product and services accordingly, becomes strategic advantage to organizations.
Innovation in Indian Context
Innovation is a ‘new idea’ which is delivered by an ‘organization’ in a profitable and sustained way to ‘users’. Users are the key drivers for any innovation. Today the Indian ‘user’ who have complex cultural diversity, never before economical aspirations, positively confident, deep religious legacy and rapidly migrating between values is a unique driver for innovation.
Indian users are today demanding unique solutions which reflect their unique position. Surface adaptations from developed economy will remain a short term compromise.
Innovation directed for ‘Bottom of the pyramid’ will result in a paradigm change strongly affecting the future of the world. We need many more professionals to engage in innovation processes and to create appropriate innovation eco-system to gain momentum to address the true potential of this opportunity standing before India.
Design Research and Innovation
Technology defines what is possible, business defines what is feasible and people define what is needed. This is the premise of Innovation as it is unfolding today.
Core of Design research is not about recording known facts but to keep peeling the obvious for those untold, barely felt whispers from the mind of people and then articulating them into understandable and actionable specifications for innovation.
Knowing what is coming is the basic ingredients to create the future. For creating future product, service or the way people will organize themselves.
As people studying people, the process is about the subject as well as the researcher. Sharpening capacity for empathy and observation also makes one sensitive towards environment, people around and self. It is a meditative process which makes one humble and respects the enormous ingenuity of the ordinary people.
Efforts at Elephant
A dedicated team to generate highest level of knowledge and skill is working at Elephant. Design research is a serious discipline and needs focused long term commitment. Adding to these the lack of India centric methods and analytical tools make this process challenging.
To create the Innovation eco system Elephantversity – Institute of Innovation was launched. Here the focus is to collectively learn how to innovate putting user at the centre without the boundary of any discipline or profession. In today’s India user centric Innovation is everyone’s agenda, be an engineer, journalist, educationist, scientist, finance or IT professional.
Posted by Partho Guha
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