The title grows on you: I inherited the title of the
course from Prof S Rajeev who had been teaching it for fifteen years. Thanks to
the suggestions from PGPEM chair Prof Gopal Mahapatra and PGPEM program manager
Sandeep Kudachi, I got an opportunity teach it. I initially thought the title
had too many loaded abstract words and thought I could shorten it later.
However, over the last 3 years I have begun to appreciate the three dimensions of
the course – innovation management, management of technology and strategic
thinking. And I hope to build on them further.
Process vs people/outcome: As the above image shows
we ended up studying innovation stories of a number of innovators / innovation
leaders. However, we kept our focus on the learnable process rather than people
characteristics. This was a side effect of my process bias. While I understand
how inspiring Steve Jobs or Elon Musk could be, I am not convinced one can
become like one of them. In fact, we did study a case of Elizabeth Holmes who
tried to become like Steve Jobs, at least outwardly. However, even in the
Theranos case, our primary emphasis was “How to detect innovation frauds?”
Along with success stories, we also studied failures (e.g. Fabmart) and work-in-progress
(Vimeo) stories. In fact, the theme “learning to fail with comfort” was running
throughout the course.
Culture friendly approaches: Taliban government came
to power while the course was going on. We asked, “If you were hired as a
consultant by department of education in Taliban government, what suggestions
will you give?” If you suggest, “Empower women”, it may not go far. Our
cultural biases influence our absorption capacity. The same goes for every organization because
each has a unique culture. And hence we played special attention to learning to
design culture friendly approaches. One way is to learn from the internal
bright spots – things that have worked within the same culture in the past. In
case of Taliban, one such starting point could be to dig out bright spots in
education from 1996 to 2001 when Taliban was in power.
Thanks to the amazing infrastructure IIMB has invested in, I
got to experience the hybrid mode of teaching for half the course. In hybrid
mode, half the students were in the class and the other half were online and
they would switch the following week. Many students felt in-class interactions
– with teacher but more importantly with other classmates – were far more
effective than in the online mode. Especially for my teaching style where
in-class group discussions are important, hybrid mode made a big difference.
