Trust & Innovation

Raj Sisodia, the author of Firms of Endearment, talks about the trust in organizations. He mentions examples where organizations have moved from being low trust to high trust and the amount of effort involved in doing so. He makes a very important point when he says that organizations always expect the employees to be trustworthy but they do not always reciprocate the same. He also mentions building of trust as a long term goal as it takes time to build a trust in a large established organization.

I would like to add that Innovation will flourish in a high-trust organization. By its very nature, Innovation is a high risk game and one can never predict the outcome. People would be willing to take more risk if they can trust their teams, their managers and leadership. If they can trust them to share their ideas, if they can trust them to support them and share the credit if the idea take off finally, they will come forth and contribute in a much bigger way to the organization. 

Interestingly, trust is big reciprocal trait. When you trust someone, you invite them to trust you. And unless one of you have hidden agendas, this can be the beginning of a trusting relationship. 

CII Conference on IP and MSME

This week I attended a 2 day conference on IP and Micro, Small and medium enterprises. This was a CII event in collaboration with WIPO. With good representation from various IP Cells across the countries and the other Government agencies involved in promoting and protecting IP, and private players who can potentially play a bigger role in IP in the country, it was a well rounded event.

The no of Govt agencies that have a mandate to promote IP in the country and that too at the grassroots level for smaller setups was a revelation. But at the same time it was disappointing to see that the gross under utilization of services offered by them and the funds available with them. 

I have been thinking about what can bridge this gap and the first thing that comes to my mind is Awareness. The information has to be readily available in the public domain. But a more important one is that Govt officials have to be more responsive and they need to simplify their unnecessarily long processes and an attitude to help rather than to just pass the file to the next table. They all admitted that if you visit our office, be prepared to keep visiting it for at least 6 months, the processes are slow. Since they are aware of the bottlenecks in their processes, I wish hey do something about this now.

Statistics on Patents filing trend in India is last few years is interesting, and so was the data on trademarks specially in the MSME segment. Though the no of filings is increasing, there is a big question on the commercialization of the same. I believe Indian companies are on a patent wave and are filing patents for the sake of announcing a no, rather than actually believing in the commercial value of the patents. 

Incidentally, the conference had no representation from the MSMEs themselves, hope the organizers reach out to them too in the next seasons of this conference.

The other side of Innovation by Vijay Govindarajan

Vijay Govindarajan talks about his new book 'Other side of Innovation' and how it talks about the 99% perspiration that Edison once spoke about. 

I liked his analogy of climbing a mountain, where he equates ideation to climbing the mountain which has challenges and excitement, and execution to coming down the mountain, which has many dangers involved and is not as glamourous as climbing. But the completion of the task depends equally on how well you come down the mountain. 

Gandhian Model for Innovation.

Raghunath Mashelkar, a scholar & scientist talks about the Gandhian Model for Innovation in a Strategy & Business interview , which in one line means getting more from less for more people. It is inspired by Gandhi's belief that Earth provides for everyone's needs but not greed. 

He sites Tata Nano and Arvind Eye care as the leading example of this model. Describing in detail how the technology has helped the fishermen in coastal areas through knowledge of availability of fish and also the buyers of the fish, he talks about the role of technology in changing people's lives. 

The model has now existed for sometime now and well studied and well documented, but associating it with Gandhi's name, gives it a lot more weight.