Good designers are just like good doctors.

They find great alternatives, not necessarily by processing information (codified) like a computer does, but by an invisible skill — Design Thinking. Malcolm Gladwell explains the phenomenon in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005) [I’m not saying I agree with everything in the book … but nevertheless].

The example of Kenna, a musician who is loved by critics for his eclectic style but fails to get a record deal because his music does not test well in marketing surveys, is instructive, as it illustrates how the “thin-slicing” of experts differs markedly from the mass market. Other examples in this chapter include the failure of “New Coke” in the 1980s, when Coca-Cola attempted to improve sales by making a version of Coke that tasted more like Pepsi because blind taste test results favored Pepsi, as well as an office chair that did not test well in marketing surveys but that turned out to be a best-seller. In this chapter, Gladwell highlights how expert thin-slicing is especially valuable and considerably more accurate in judging worth than the mass market or the novice, concluding that what turns out to be a successful product might be more accurately judged by the people who are experts in that field.

Design Thinking is not just a series of steps to carry out mindlessly. Forget the process and tools for a moment and focus on understanding the user first. While doing so, use every bit of your past experience and knowledge in designing products and services that have the potential to enrich end-user experience.

Trust your gut, don’t just hand over that part to Design Thinking or any other “tool”. Good luck!

Image: https://in.pinterest.com/source/cope-yp.blogspot.com/

Design should be used to create the spark, not just to fight the fire.

The highest value comes from a designer’s work when products she designs can keep users delighted, safe and comfortable  while simultaneously ensuring the planet is safe and well.

Special Golden
Jubilee edition Foreword by
Dr. Srinivasan Sundarrajan
Director, National Institute of Technology, Trichy

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Write to us directly to order in bulk for your families / friends / colleagues.

The First Princi.pal is a story waiting to be told. Meandering through the life of Dr. PS Mani Sundaram, it captures anecdotes of mixed flavour to highlight the genius of one of independent India’s foremost institution builders. Princi gave Regional Engineering College, Trichy (now National Institute of Technology) the distinction of consistently featuring among the top 10 Engineering colleges for 50 years running. His was a professional career that had to beat the odds of functioning under India’s political and bureaucratic regimes of the 1960s and 70s. Not only did he measure up to the challenges, his astute administrative sense made sure he did so in style.

A charismatic leader—administrator par excellence, pragmatic visionary and academic entrepreneur—he upped the ante of India’s higher education. Besides driving the astounding success of REC, he laid a solid foundation for Bharathidasan University as its first Vice Chancellor. His foresight has seen it grow from strength to strength in the three decades of its existence. Today the Bharathidasan Institute of Management stands tall as one of India’s premier Business Schools, rubbing shoulders with the IIMs.

2014 marks the Golden Jubilee of REC Trichy’s founding and a fitting occasion for a tribute to the great man.

This book is that tribute.

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From an excellent post by Brian Ling suggesting design freedom + designer responsibility. He makes a strong point with the following from Victor Papanek’s Design For The Real World —

There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second. Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered file boxes, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people. Before (in the ‘good old days’), if a person liked killing people, he had to become a general, purchase a coal-mine, or else study nuclear physics. Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed. And the skills needed in these activities are taught carefully to young people.

In an age of mass production when everything must be planned and designed, design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself). This demands high social and moral responsibility from the designer. It also demands greater understanding of the people by those who practise design and more insight into the design process by the public.

via Nimble Design Firms should Do Good | Design Sojourn.

A great place to start is at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Read my post Becoming Rich by Designing for the Poor where I argue that the consumerist model of Western capitalism has proven detrimental even to the developed economies and will spell doom if carried into the so-called emerging markets. Designers wield a power to lead the way by engaging in what Brian has so aptly named “do good” design, a coinage that’s likely to stick.

Listen to him. Go be awesome!

Last year, Amit Gulati, who runs Incubis Consultants, invited me to participate in an interactive session to think through design ideas for a low-cost washing machine. The workshop brought out some very interesting and fascinating ‘ways of seeing’ that completely overturned the engineering / tech / product way of approaching design problems. Did we need to redesign the washing machine (Product) under stricter constraints [this is the way most people think – start with an existing product, strip it of features, use cheaper materials and processes, reduce quality and make it low-cost], or did we need to go up a level and reframe the problem itself.

Image Courtesy: Incubis Consultants, 2013.

*                      *                      *

In the old days — as recently as the dying years of the last century — technology was trying to keep up with our needs. But instead of playing catch up, its pace overtook our needs. In the end, technology, especially those products that were powered by the silicon chip, won the race. Today we have more technology than we need and yet, rather than using what already exists to solve societal problems, we still go after creating more and more technology for the narrowest part of the pyramid – the top.

I suspect this has more to do with where the dollars come from than the fact that a lot of existing technology can easily be reconfigured for the underserved sections of society. Personally, the clichéd BoP social impact solutions we hear of are likely to be outmoded even before they see the light of day. But that won’t keep the incumbent interests from flogging the proverbial dead horse. We have become masters of leveraging information asymmetry even in the Internet era and will continue to exploit the ignorance of customer with impunity.

*                      *                      *

Markets have shifted from the West;

India is predicted to become the 5th largest market in the world by 2025.

Rural India’s income is expected to grow at 3.6% per year from now till 2025 – people’s aspirations will grow. More disposable money will make them the largest potential consumers of goods and services.

But the question really is whether the consumerist model of the rest of the world is the right fit. Look at what it has done to the US. While on the one hand it seems clear that India will be one of the largest markets in the world, on the other there’s the question of what to make available to this burgeoning segment and how much.

Also at what cost to the larger social and ecological environment.

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Borderless trade has reconfigured market size for products, and ‘placeless work’ has obliterated geo-anchors for service delivery. Except for a few localization tweaks, most of what is consumed is largely uniform across continents and down societal hierarchies. India still lags behind in providing its citizens basics – education, healthcare, livelihood, food and shelter. Our very own ‘roti, kapda aur makaan’ [Hindi for ‘food, clothing and shelter’] forms the base of Maslow’s famous pyramid.

The effects of recent financial reforms are visible in the westernized lifestyle of our cities. They have provided the velocity of capital needed to fulfill the rising aspirations of the middle class. It is very easy to fall prey to conventional wisdom of ‘exporting’ this to smaller towns and villages. We need not only to shape markets but also reshape the patterns of consumption to conform to sustainability guidelines and eco-friendly practices.

Leveraging the Internet to empower individuals and enable small businesses in semi‐urban and rural areas is a fool-proof strategy. The reducing cost of Internet, increased access to low‐cost, high‐speed connectivity in rural areas and cheaper access to content in a hyperlocal way become powerful change agents in the way information will be delivered, consumed and shared to up the ante in fulfilling basic human needs.

 Throw in a smartphone and you have a winner. Much of the rural urban divide is accentuated by lack or lag of information availability. Smartphones, even the cheapest on the market today, will ensure that the consumer is ‘always on’.

*                      *                      *

•  Is it important for electronics companies to tap the market at the bottom of the pyramid? Why?

That’s an easy one. The answer is size. Simply size. And it’s growing.

On one side, the share of wallet of each player is shrinking with increased competition. Overseas markets may not be shrinking but have gotten saturated. India is one of the best hunting grounds for large international companies, not just owing to market size (and the fact that it is one of the fastest growing) also that the semi-urban and rural consumers are beginning to aspire for better lifestyles, therefore better products.

The fact that more than two-thirds of the Indian population lives in rural parts is another driving factor. Up until now, rural has been seen as an unviable marketplace. This is because our calculations have been done on numbers that are not even a fraction of the rural population.

Going early to a market that’s ready and eager simply makes good business sense.

• How do you go about addressing Bottom of Pyramid (BoP)?

Building products for the BoP market is not easy. There are multiple factors at play here, from cost and usability to culture and economics. It makes sense to go bottom up; create a portfolio of products and services to fulfill basic needs before going after the goodies.

My list of ‘basic’ has

1. Healthcare, Education, Finance at a category level;
2. those areas that create better living conditions such as sanitation, clean water, food, energy at the next; and
3. communication as a means to keep abreast with the world as well as a channel for feedback, fun and information exchange.

I’m not saying bottom of the pyramid is either easy or that it will be any cheaper. Quite the opposite. There’s no intelligence required if all we have to do is to strip the product down to its essentials to reduce quality.

I’m also not a big advocate for inventing niche products to go into these markets. These products must be simple, intuitive, safe and sexy – aka world-class. I don’t see why not. Prof. Anil Gupta famously says, “the minds at the margins are not marginal minds.”

The questions we need to ask ourselves are

Ought we pamper the bottom half of the pyramid while clandestinely reaching into their pockets giving them products that they don’t really need? Where will the energy to power these products come from? Is there an equivalent Maslow’s hierarchy that maps needs to products and services?

Some of the products we saw in the movie 3 Idiots are pointers for the kind that we need to look at. Not jugaad, but ‘concerted reuse of available and existing technologies’ to take these prototypes to commercialization with the help of interdisciplinary experts and groups.

•  How does one make a low-cost product – is it about ground-up re-design with a cost focus, or about using low-cost components? 

The most important part is context.

Context is about culture, geography, climate, behavior, resources, energy within the boundaries of environmental friendliness and ecology.

Everything else is secondary – design, materials, processes, technology and finally economic considerations. I have on purpose kept economics at the bottom of the list.

Call it ‘inversion thinking’.

Economics drives everything in today’s world, whereas it is merely a function of supply and demand. In my view, the concept of low-cost itself is deeply flawed. What we should really concern ourselves with is lower price and, however counterintuitive it may seem, lower price is not simply lower cost. I’m no economist but my business sense tells me that I can drive the price down by increasing volumes and reducing profits. Besides, adopting newer business models such as crowdsourcing, collaborative manufacturing and other such innovation, points to ways of addressing this key issue.

Low-cost is different from cost-effective is different from value added. Unless the envisaged product enhances value, low-cost has no meaning.

Secondly, sometimes, the problem itself needs to be reframed. A case in point is the UID (Aadhaar) project. Has anybody even bothered to look at alternatives? Is the goal merely digitization?

Here’s a thought experiment –

imagine Nandan went up to any smartphone manufacturer and placed an order for 700 million smartphones and then told all telecom operators to use their distributors to give these away for free. Caveat: KYC (Know-your-customer) norms must adhered to. He’d probably have even Apple and AT&T eating out of his hand. Now, if you did a back-of-napkin calculation of what the current method of UID creation costs, I reckon you could give away a smartphone for free and still have some money left for the launch party. But economics aside, see what you would have gone and done, every person in the BoP category would have a phone – whose utility goes way beyond a piece of plastic – and would have unequalled aspiration fulfillment for the recipient. No rocket science here, just some plain old common sense.

If I were to look at transportation for the lower half of the pyramid, would I produce a low-cost car? That’s what Tata thought and look what happened to the Nano. We don’t need a low-cost car, what we need really is low-cost transportation. See what I mean?

Takeaway

Recast the needs of this segment into their context first and address other considerations subsequently.

Related articles

1. To strip down or not! Janani Gopalakrishnan Vikram’s piece in EFY, Dec 2103.
2. Evolution of Rural Customer Emergence of rural India as a viable market.

via Job Description for Accidental Entrepreneurs – Business Insider.

Entrepreneurs are folks that have no Plan ‘A’. But they have Plans “B-Z”. 

Entrepreneurship is no accident. It is a choice. Contrary to popular opinion, choosing to be an entrepreneur is less about being your own boss or enjoying the freedom to come and go to work as you please. Being an entrepreneur, and a successful one at that, needs much more discipline than being in a job. The hardest part is that you have to take responsibility for yourself. It’s much more fun though – the uncertainty of your next paycheck, the fear of something not working, the prospect of keeping your team and partners motivated – and is motivated by the opportunity to make a difference.

Are you an entrepreneur at heart? Jump into the fray. Now is as good a time as any, especially here in India. And if you still have doubts, start by being an entrepreneur in your current role. Don’t wait for instructions. Don’t worry about policy. Don’t cry about the absence of an ecosystem. You have the chance to create an ecosystem that will allow you to grow. Follow your heart and go build the life of your dreams.

Good luck!

India is known globally for the rise of its information-technology and software industry. Yet in this video interview, Yasheng Huang, a professor of global economics and management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and essayist from Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower Simon & Schuster, November 2013, warns the country against becoming too dependent on those sectors. He argues India’s potential will only be realized if the country develops its manufacturing and services sectors, which requires labor-market reforms and significant investments in both education and social services. Without those, India will not only face growing social inequality but could also jeopardize its pipeline of college-ready students critical to the high-tech industry.

via Reimagining India: A conversation with Yasheng Huang | McKinsey & Company.

I stumbled upon this video that made me numb and hopeful at the same time.

Severn Suzuki addresses the UN conference on Environment 1992 at Rio on behalf ECO  (Environmental Childrens Organisation) run by a bunch of 12 and 13 year olds. She must have turned 33 this year. 2 decades and 1 year on, we’ve only plundered more.

When will we STOP!!?

Her morality accuses our ethics.

Did you hear the anger, the angst and the anxiousness? Did you hear her plead for us to stop plundering the planet? Did you hear her cry for justice and for a safe future for her children? If you didn’t, hit the play button again. And again … and again, till you do.

Amen.

I have a confession to make. The cover led me to believe that this was another one of those innovation cookbooks by two opportunistic wannabe Jugaad aficionados (I still have a huge problem with the cover design in that it is trying hard to impress while succeeding to do just the opposite). The first chapter could only reinforce my belief that here was another version of the many ‘product improvement through R&D is innovation’ treatises that are strewn about ever since innovation became a fashion label. Am I glad that I persisted, if only to collect enough ammunition to tear it to shreds. Surprise, surprise! The book is not only an easy read but is a good resource for organizations that want to understand how to carry out innovation.

The authors give out two clear messages –

(1) that everybody can innovate,

(2) innovation success is less about isolated creative sparks than a concerted approach both to motivate the elephant (incentive) and direct the driver (clarity).

They address the oft heard refrain of ‘Can Innovation be taught?’ with a balanced and realistic “there are certain things which are really hard to teach: to be empathetic, how to develop insights or how to develop passion or even an itch for solving a particular problem. However, there are many areas where more awareness and techniques [can] help develop skills.” And when they say the book is about making innovation more systematic and predictable, they walk their talk.

The book is replete with examples, some relevant to the context of innovation, others simply anecdotes of triggers for improvement. I wish the authors had taken it upon themselves to go the extra distance of pointing out the ‘innovation aspect’ in each example – the finishing isn’t there, so although each story makes sense on its own, the thread connecting it to innovation is missing in many cases. Simply improving something or solving a problem isn’t necessarily innovation; that’s stretching it to the classic trap of taking anything you like and giving it an innovative (pun intended) twist. The key takeaways at the end of each chapter are really all you need. And that’s a nice thoughtful touch.

It isn’t clear, however, who the book is intended for. That the authors are highly experienced in their own fields is amply evident. I’m wondering if this is a handbook for innovation managers, CxOs, or individual innovators. I can hear the authors say all of the above, but that’s too broad for comfort or value. One critical thing that Vinay and Rishikesha successfully do is bring down the language of innovation several levels, making it widely accessible.

Read the review on Hindustan Times