(However

Creativity

there

is

is

the

nothing

ultimate

August 2011 / 72

called

u l t i m at e

skill

in

of

c r e at i v i t y )

mankind

Innovating India I - Daring to dream

Can you imagine a house for $300 (Rs 13,500/-)? Vijay Govindarajan ? of Dartmouths Tuck School dreams so. What is common between Xerxes Desai of Titan Watches and Ratan Tata of Tata Motors? They made ? the world wonder by making the slimmest watch, even Swiss could not make, and a car for Rupees one lakh, even Americans and Japanese could not imagine. nese What about Dr G Venkataswamy of Aravind Eye Hospital and Varaprasad Reddy of Shanta Biotech? They brought down the ? prices of some essential health care products by fifteen fold and made en the multinationals to kneel down. What about J K Tripathy, the then Commissioner of Tiruchi Police and S R Rao, the then Commissioner of Surat ner Surat? They made paradigm shifting, even in public services. What is common between C K Ranganathan (CKR) of Cavin Kare and Karsanbai Patel of Nirma? They made the multinationals run for the money What is common to all the above? above They all had the courage to dream.

Literature is flooded with data on innovation practices of organisations like 3M, Nokia, Sony, Dupont, Google, Proctor and Gamble, Motorola, GE, Toyota, Apple and what not? Now information has started coming in about Indian initiatives as well. E.g., Making Breakthrough Innovation through Happen by Porus Munshi and World Class in India by Sumantra Ghoshal, Gita Piramal and Sudeep Bhudhiraja are two typical books. I am very often referring to these books for the next three articles.

Fortune at the botto om of the pyramid: Harvard Business Review

(Jan Feb 2011) reported about Vijay Govindarajans dream house. L Last month, a self-organized team from organized Mahindra and Mahindra, (M&M) won , the corporate award for our own $300 House Open Design Challenge (with the help of Jovoto.com and prize sponsor Ingersoll Rand, who hosted a global online contest to raise in interest in design for the poor. They received exactly 300 entries!) Working in their spare time, the M&M team designed a $300 House for the rural sector in India as well. The team, encouraged by senior management, is now working on a pilot of their design.

Your faith is what you believe, not what you know John Lancaster Spalding

Last week, the Tata Group, announced , the launch of an ultra low-cost, flat-pack cost, flat house designed for rural India. The basic model will be available as a 20 square meter pre-fabricated kit designed for fabricated onsite installation at the price of Rs 31,500/- ($700). A larger model will also ). wil be available at Rs 44,000/- ($980). (There are also plans for a house that comes with a solar panel on the roof.) The pilot house is being tested in 30 locations spread across India, with detailed feedback expected at the end of the year from the Panchayats, or village governments. ts, Bill Gross, the founder and CEO of Idealab, described the design challenges faced by Worldhaus, a $1,000 house for , the poor that his team has been working on. In a blog post written specifically for the series on the $300 house, he wrote that "the lack of quality affordable housing to almost 1.5 billion people has always called out to me as a problem needing new and innovative solutions. We need to ew think big and deploy disruptive technologies and financing mechanisms to house 100 million people by the end of the decade." We're overjoyed to see businesses take up the challenge and enter this giantgiant but-latent market with their proverbial ket eyes wide open. We have maintained all along that business is crucial to taking on this wicked problem because businesses know how to scale, and fixing this problem requires scale. We also believe cooperation is necessary. In that spirit, we want to share some of what we're hearing as we continue on the path to building not only $300 Houses, but communities of them. (www.300house.com) Looking where have looked and seeing what no one has seen was the strategy

followed by CKR and Captain Gopinath of Air Deccan. Both of them looked at the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. When CKR was planning to enter shampoo business, there we only the were major players like Hindustan Unilever (HUL), Proctor & Gamble (P&G) etc. , selling shampoos in big bottles. At that time hardly 8% of the population in India was using shampoos, who can afford to pay for big bottles. CKR looked at the 92% . people, who can buy shampoos at 50 paise sachets. He started selling shampoos at a price more people can afford to In a short rice to. time HUL and P & G started selling shampoos in sachets. When Captain Gopinath was planning to enter the aviation industry, there wer were only major players like Air India, Jet Airways etc. who were flying the 6% creamy layer of the people of India. Captain Gopinath looked beyond and saw more Indians will fly if the fares are brought down. He started Indias first low cost carriers (LCC). And the rest is history. . Air India started Air India Express, Jet Airways converted Air Sahara, which they bought, in to LCC and further went for Jet Airways Konnect, and King Fisher bought Air Deccan and named it as King Fisher Red. Seeing the success of Air Deccan, three exclusive LCCs, Spicejet, Indigo and Go Air emerged. Nirma Detergents and Babool toothpaste, adopted similar strategies, strateg even before C K Prahlad came with his theory on fortune at the bottom of the fortune pyramid. Nirma started selling detergents at half the price of Surf and Babool toothpaste at half the price of Colgate. (To be continued in the next issue.)

The primary cause of unhappiness in the world today is lack of fai faith Carl Jung

Discussions

Competition 71 Man in the lift (CS71)

Every morning a man gets into the lift on the 14th floor of the high rise building he lives and rides down to the very ground level. In the evening, he gets in the lift, rides up to the tenth floor, gets out and climbs the rest four floors. Why does he do so? You might have heard this puzzle before and the answer given at that time was that he was a dwarf and his hand could reach only the tenth floor button and not above that. BUT OUR MAN HERE IS TALL ENOUGH TO OUR REACH THE HIGHEST LEVEL BUTTON, YET HE BEHAVES LIKE THIS. WHY SO? Think at least eight possible reasons

There are many possiblilities. He wants exercise, he wants to meet his friend, he gives daily reports to his boss who lives there, 1 is his lucky number, the scenic view from 1 th floor is es 10 10 very fine, etc. All these are based on the assumption that he gets down on his own. But what if he actually has to get out rather than he wants to surely the conventional solution (the man is too short to reach) is now the only one? No. The higher lift buttons could be broken, he is charged for if he goes above 14, repair work is going on etc. , CONGRATULATIONS: Saaswath Nachiappa of Chennai (on few occasions power failed on while crossing the tenth floor, and since then he decided not to go by lift beyond (2 , reasons)), Sandeep Agrawal of Jamshedpur (8), L Nachiappa of Chennai, (he wants to avoid meeting the people who live just opposite to the entrance of the lift from 11th floor onwards (11), Ratan Jhadav of Pune (8), Jayalakshmi (3), K V Subrahmanyam of Chennai, some of his clients live from 11th floor upwards, he doesnt know numbers beyond 10 and he , goes for daily collection (21) and three others who havent given thier names.

Letters

S Karunakaran, Kochi: Do you think , Anna Hazare and his team will succeed in bringing Jan Lokpal Bill by following Mahatma Gandhis way? Mahtma Gandhi could win over the English people by his non-violence route, because, to violence a large extent, English were gentlemen. With the present third-rated politicians, I am only rated worried about Team Annas safety. They all may be declared as terrorists and finished fin through the encounter route. G Gandhi, Visakhapatnam: The content is excellent. I have started using my left hand for small jobs that you have mentioned in the article. The thought of identifying annoying things is also simple and excellent. Chintamani Trivedi, Pune: Yesterday I explained the Fight, Flight, Freeze (3F) principle of Problem Solving to my sister,

which you taught. She also found it very useful. Ajaya Gupta, USA: I liked what you said , "Keep enjoying the unexpected," that is unexpected the bond between Left Brain the Brainworkaholic factory connecting to Right Brain- the creative factory. Y Chandra Sekhar, Visakhapatnam: We , appreciate your relentless and continuous contribution to this domain and we are amazed to see your efforts in updating the creative knowledge. M N Rajeev, Chennai: I found this post , (CS71) particularly useful and interesting. In fact I am typing this with the left hand. S Senthilnathan, Bhubaneswar: I liked , your comment Everything requires to be maintained, including the right brain. Subroto Ghosal, Mumbai: Y have a lot You of energy and dedication.

You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without faith Samuel Butler

Letters

S K Gupta, Mumbai: Our company is , following 25% reservation policy, I mean, whatever we perform, 25% of us would be declared as star performers and another 25% as poor performers. It really . demotivates me. It has some advantages and that is the reason your company is following that policy. For you the advantage is that your competitor is not our outside. You dont have to see how the world is performing, not even how other departments are performing. You only have to do better than your colleagues. I came across a story sometime back. Two persons went for hunting and in the afternoon, they were relaxing in the shades of a tree. Suddenly they saw a tiger approaching them. One of them started putting on the shoes. The other one asked him, Can you outrun the tiger? The first person answered, I dont have to outrun the tiger, I only have outrun you. P Ravikumar, Gummidipoondi: We , circulate this e-magazine to all of our magazine employees more than 250 in our plant and getting benefit. Everybody is giving good y feedback on these thought-provoking issues. Fatima Bibi, Kozhikode: Your programme has made a real change in my outlook towards life and problems. Earlier I was trying to keep away from the problems and it was only aggravating the situation. situat Now either I go for confronting them or accept them and learn to live with them. Pradeep Kumar: Your articles give me a : lot - energy, enthusiasm, new ideas etc. However it is also true that I become trapped in the conditions created by the others and then don't have much control cont on myself. I am just a part of a flowing

river and wherever it goes, takes me along. I know some of the strategies but not able to come out by that or may not be able to act the way it is required. What should I do and what will be the best way to handle such situations? Knowing what to do and how to do are just two steps in the process of change. They give you the knowledge and skill. The third and . the most important step is the want to do. It comes from attitude. Can you imagine what is going to happen by following those strategies? You should have a clear and vivid picture of the result. Next, do you have faith in what you are going to do? Are you quite sure you will get or become what you are expecting? These two requirements are very essential for developing quirements the attitude. Any doubts in them will dilute the process. Take the case of going for morning walks. I have very good knowledge about the importance of going for morning walks. I also know as to how to go about it, but havent started yet. (I plan to start from the first day of next month. I dont know how, but nowadays, the first day of the month comes quite often. So I have decided to start from the first January 2012. Monthly targets dont work for me, s I so have kept annual targets.) The reasons for this can be laziness, not getting time, not realising the importance, not having faith in morning walks (Is it all the people who go for morning walks are healthy? or C Can anyone give me guarantee?) and so ma many. Now if I imagine my activeness, health and figure (six pack), I will get when I go for morning walks and have full faith in it, then I will take it seriously. So Pradeep, do these exercises and tell me the outcome.

Faith is an assent of the mind and a consent of the heart, consisting mainly of belief and trust E T Hiscox

Competition 72 Versatile things

Make a list of everything you can do with a coat hanger. Spend two minutes. You dont have to go into detail, just bullet-point headings. point Now spend another two minutes noting everything you cant do with a coat hanger. Look at the two lists. Its usually easier to come up with more things you cant do than things you can. This isnt surprising when you consider what a very small part of everything a coat hanger occupies. Now, pick up a couple of your cant entries and turn them around. Assume that you can do absolutely anything with a coat hanger. How can you make this use possible? You will be surprised how often it is possible. Send your list to me.

Reason is the triumph of the intellect, faith of the heart James Schouler

Dr N ANNAMALAI
Email: annamalai_n@vsnl.com / www.CreativitySphere.com

Tel: 044 23719267 / 09444269395