3 types of thinking Harish Hande highlighted for social innovations

Last week, I finished co-teaching the course “From jugaad to systematic innovation” with my friend Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan at the Indian School of Development Management. In the last class, Rishi had invited Selco founder Harish Hande as a guest speaker. In a short span of half an hour, Harish managed to instill a big dose of creative energy in the class. He told us about the type of thinking he felt is required while innovating in the social sector. Here are 3 types of thinking Harish highlighted:

Holistic thinking: Harish said, “One of my biggest barriers is the ability of people to think holistically”. People tend to identify themselves with a particular discipline such as mechanical engineering, marketing, finance but nobody says, “I am a solution provider”. We get caught up in our degrees and don’t think of what it takes to bring the solution to the doorstep of the customer.

Selco has labs in Kalahandi in Odisha, Williamnagar in Meghalaya, Guwahati and Bangalore where new programs are designed. And every program design team includes an architect, an engineer, a doctor, a finance person etc. Sometimes it also includes an anthropologist and a Yakshagana artist. They have to answer the question, “Is the solution affordable in the long run?” A solution that is low-cost today could be unaffordable in the long run. For example, a solar-powered sewing machine may enable a woman to produce 8 shirts a day instead of 2. However, if she is not able to find a market for her products then we end up creating technology debt. Hence, program design teams are encouraged to spend more time exploring the problem and think long term before they think of solutions.

Cheat thinking: How do we cheat from other processes? That is, how do we copy the seed of an idea from other working examples? Harish illustrated this idea with the mid-day meal scheme. A mid-day meal attracts kids to school in order to get nourished. In a similar way, could kids be attracted to school in order to get portable batteries charged so that their houses get lighting at night? With this observation Selco’s “Light for education” program was born where a school becomes a hub for the solar infrastructure in the village, a go-to place to charge your batteries. If American Express comes up with a new financial product, could one see if there is a seed of an idea there that can be adopted? Or could we borrow something from the vocational curriculum in German schools? What Harish calls cheat thinking is similar to what I call metaphoric thinking, a solution-centric approach to problem-solving.

Open-source thinking:  A question was asked, “How do you see the role of competition in the development sector when it comes to innovation?” Harish said, “Social sector promotes collaboration on paper. But it is the worst collaborator. Competition in the social sector is much more cut-throat than in the private sector.” He added, “The aim of many of the non-profits should be to kill themselves, not to grow.” He felt we need open source thinkers whose end goal is how many people will get benefitted rather than how do I keep it to myself. There is hero-worship in the sector where people are recognized by the awards they amass. “Collaboration is far away,” Harish said. He hoped that program design with holistic thinking would promote collaboration from early stages.

It was a privilege to listen to Harish and thanks to Rishi for making this event happen.

A systemic approach to participatory development: A short primer by Prof. Shireesh Kedare

In October 2019, I got an opportunity to interview Shireesh Kedare, my hostel-mate and now a Praj Industries Professor at Department of Energy Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. Shireesh has been working in the area of renewable energy, sustainability, and participatory development for over two decades. In this short interview (28 minutes) Shireesh tells us what systemic approach to participatory development is and its roles in solving wicked problems such as farmers’ suicide etc.

Here is the MP3 audio of the interview (11MB) (The interview was done on October 21, 2019 at Sustainable Development Lab, Dept of Energy Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay).

The questions explored in the interview are:

0:00 Introduction

1:10 Why is participatory development relevant in a place like Indian Institute of Technology? Technology as a bridge between needs and resources on the pillars of science. What needs? Which resources?

6:30 What is participatory development? Who is doing to decide the needs? Centralized body? Elected members? Remote vs direct decision making, opinion-based vs study-knowledge based decision making, This has been done before e.g. Anna Hazare, Systemic approach of participatory development, Can we do this at the village level? City-level? Is it practical?

13:00 Can you give an example to illustrate the concept?  Identified 6 villages in Yavatmal district in Maharashtra state known for farmers’ suicide, didn’t go with any agenda, started developing a dialogue, team led by Dr. Vijay Honkalaskar on a period of 3-6 months along with NGO workers, met women-men-farmers-young of the village on a sustained basis, tremendous pessimism-depression, village suicide, noted 42 different loops affecting farming – family size, cattle availability, land quality, atmosphere, pesticides, seeds, govt schemes etc. Documented all this and went back to the villagers, showed them some connects are working, some are broken (family size has become small), complete picture started evolving, once the picture was clear they started suggesting solutions, economics, organic farming, tinted word, people have a phobia, small farmer 1-2 acre land feels this is not for him, changed lingo, identified basic processes, gap between practice of organic farming and people is too much, community action needs handholding.

23:00 Key elements of the approach: Don’t go with any agenda, Try to understand, assimilate the complete system, Go back and show it to them, get their reaction on it, Establish collective clarity, they decide what to do. It can backfire. Needs iteration. Need to prioritize – people may not understand what prioritization means and how to do it. People are wise, they should be given an opportunity to understand and solve their problems.

Hope you find it useful. More details about Prof. Kedare can be found on his home page. 

Book review: “Recasting India” by Hindol Sengupta

“The world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greed,” said Mahatma Gandhi. However, in Independent India several hundreds of millions – so called “bottom of the pyramid” – have struggled to meet their basic needs. For the past sixty years, Indian Government has been making promises to alleviate poverty, educate people and failing miserably. Today, India ranks 101 out of 133 countries on Social Progress Index. Traditionally it was assumed in India that Entrepreneur and Enterprise are poor agents of social change. Hindol Sengupta argues in his book “Recasting India: How entrepreneurship is revolutionizing the world’s largest democracy” that this assumption is wrong and, in fact, entrepreneurs are playing a key role in addressing the needs of lower strata. Through numerous examples of socially-conscious ventures from Jammu & Kashmir to Tamilnadu, Hindol shows that enterprises are changing the lives of millions – from scavengers to maids. Unfortunately, the book is mostly silent on how enterprises are influencing the greed of everyone. Here are a few snippets from the book that stood out for me:

Pizza delivery ka koi jaath nahin hotha (Pizza delivery has no caste): This is from Prasad, a Dalit writer from Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. According to him the revolution in India has already happened and all the upper caste intellectuals have not bothered to notice. The number of bullocks in a village on the Jaunpur-Azamgarh road has dropped from 1200 to 4 between 1995 and 2005. Why? Because there is no one to plough with the animals any more. Prasad says, “Landlord after landlord complained to me that the Dalits have left the village  and moved to the city with better jobs (like pizza delivery)”

Whose apple is that? Between 10 to 30 percent of Kashmiri apple crop gets wasted due to the lack of storage and processing facilities. Khurram Mir started Harshna Naturals in 2008 after returning with a management degree from Purdue University. The vision statement of Harshna says that the company should be used almost wholly by local farmers. A big poster at Harshna gives a warning – no one should be seen eating an apple within the compound. Mir says, “If someone is seen eating an apple and there are farmers around, they will immediately wonder ‘Whose apple is that?’ and raise an alarm. We are working to create an environment of full transparency which has been difficult here.”

Maid servant to Maids service: Anuradha, who lives in South City I, Gurgaon, pays Rs. 20,000 a month for the services of two employees of The Maids’ Company – one for twelve hours a day and another for six. If the maid is going to be late, she gets an SMS. The maid gets one day off every week. If a maid is absent any day, she gets a replacement. This is what Hindol calls – a complete renegotiation of social contract of domestic labour. Maids’ Company employees are regularly beaten by their husbands at home. The company employs a full-time nurse and has two rooms on top of the office for such women to stay for a day or two when they are thrown out of their houses. Where does it get money for these activities? The Maids' Company, started by Gauri Singh and Indu Bagri, has 20 percent of its equity in a reserved pool that is owned by a cooperative trust of the workers. The equity supports various welfare activities.

Getting out of the worst kind of catch-22: 750,000 odd manual scavenger families live the worst kind of life across India. They hand-pick human faeces and carry it in a basket. They have virtually no interaction with anyone who is not a scavenger. Project Azmat developed by Safai Karmachari Andolan and Shri Ram College of Commerce has identified 20 scavenger women from the village of Nekpur in Haryana and turned them into entrepreneurs.  They make detergent which is sold across Delhi with the brand “Neki”. Apart from money the work has given them social dignity missing for generations in their community. People in the village have started inviting them into their house.

The book presents these and many more inspiring stories of social change through enterprises and entrepreneurs. It is a must read for anyone who is a serious student of innovation, social change and social entrepreneurship.

When I read the story from Gurgaon which Hindol calls – a schizophrenic, dystopian soul of India, a place where everything has gone wrong and right at the same time – I wondered what caused the problems of Gurgaon in the first place? Is it the greed of the enterprises and entrepreneurs? That takes us back to the Gandhiji quote we started with. Which one needs more urgent attention: the need of the needy or the greed of the greedy? I don’t know.

Image source: npr.org

Killing an idea: Lessons from the destruction of Nalanda University

When Muhammad Bakhtiar Khilji set ablaze Nalanda University in the winter of 1193-94, he wouldn’t have guessed that he was uprooting the idea of “university” itself from the Indian subcontinent. It would take another 600 years before the idea of university got seeded in India again. It has been a couple of weeks since our visit to the ruins of Nalanda, but I still can’t get over the 600 years long burial. Is it really fair to hold Muhammad Bakhtiar responsible for the “killing”? History tells us that it is not. Then what else is responsible for the prolonged hibernation of the concept of college? Let’s see in this article.

Nalanda was established in 5^th century and at its peak had 10,000 students and 1,000 teachers. For centuries it had been the most important seat of learning in Asia. It had three multi-storied libraries. Most of what we know of Nalanda comes from the travel accounts of the Chinese pilgrim and scholar Xuanzhang who spent a couple of years at Nalanda. Xuanzhang studied logic, grammar, Sanskrit and Yogacara school of Buddhism during his time at Nalanda. 

Nalanda is about 90km from Patna and we reached there by car in less than two hours. Archaeological Survey of India has done a good job in maintaining the site as well as the museum next to it. Our guide at Nalanda was a sixty year old gentleman and in this business for over four decades. He had picked up Japanese and was enthusiastic about his forty-five minute tour of the place. His version of the story of the destruction of Nalanda had an interesting twist. According to his story, when Bakhtiar arrived near Nalanda he asked the locals if this place had any loot. The Brahmins were prompt to point out that the place had something far more important than the loot and strongly advised him to destroy it. Apparently the smoke from the burning manuscripts hung for days.

If the act of commission – burning the place down – was an important cause of Nalanda’s destruction, an equally if not more important cause was the act of omission by Brahmins. Historian Charles Allen writes following in his book, “Ashoka: The search for India’s lost emperor” – The most striking evidence of Brahmanical hostility towards Buddhism comes in the form of silence: the way in which India’s Buddhist history, extending over large parts of the country and lasting for many centuries, was excised from the historical record.

Do you want to kill an idea? You can, of course, try to shoot it down by sheer power like Bakhtiar Khilji. Alternately, you can silently ignore it as if it doesn’t exist like the Brahmins. Neither approach is foolproof though. You never know when a Xuanzhang would escape and start spreading the word in a different corner. 

photo credit: Gauri Dabholkar

Enabling a culture change in rural government schools: Prasanna shares Sikshana experience

V R Prasanna was one of the panellists at the “Enabling a culture change” session at the Next Gear workshop on innovation leadership I facilitated in July. Prasanna is the CEO of Sikshana Foundation which was rated among the top three in India in education intervention by Times Social Impact Awards (Sept 2011). Prasanna moved back from the US to India in 2007 to help scale up the organization. In this interview Prasanna shares his experience in enabling a culture change in the context of rural government schools.

The interview explores following questions:

1. Can you please share a culture change story from Sikshana?
2. Why is change difficult?
3. How do you sustain ownership in change initiatives?
4. What role rewards play in change initiatives?
5. What happens to the change when Sikshana stops support?
6. How does Sikshana get teachers to experiment?

A sample question & answer is given below. You can find the complete interview here

Q: What roles rewards play in change initiatives?

Prasanna: In our case, we found that the easiest way to motivate a teacher is a pat on the back. They work in a system where nobody cares about them. One of our initial experiences was with a teacher in a remote school –  with 12+ years of service. When we asked him , “Sir, how are you doing?” The teacher almost had tears in his eyes. When we asked, “Did we say something wrong?” He said, “First time in 12 years in this school, somebody has asked me how I am doing” That is the simplest form of reward. On the other end, we send teachers to the US. Someone who might not have seen Bangalore goes to the US and spends four weeks there.

We find rewards play a similar role for a child to change. In rural setting, when children go back from school, they dump their bag and immediately run out. Because there is nobody at home to share their school experience. To sustain the change, something needs to happen outside the school environment. How do we do this? We can’t become the parents. But the child has to be rewarded at some basic level. So we introduced something called a “spot prize” in classrooms.

Every teacher is equipped with nominal amount with which they buy something and give it away. This is one of our most successful programs. We don’t spend more than Rs. 30 per child in the whole year. We have introduced stars which they can wear on their uniform. And once they collect ten stars they redeem it for something – crayons or pencil set or they can hold on till the next ten stars and get a geometry box.

This idea (of stars) came from a teacher. I had gone to a school near Hubli. We had given spot prizes to be awarded in the school. This teacher had written some names and some numbers next to it. I asked, “What are these numbers?” The teacher said, “I liked your idea. But I run out of prizes very quickly. Attendance is a huge issue. So I have to give them more. So whenever a student asks a good question or a correct answer I start writing points. This becomes more like a game and it is getting everyone to participate actively in the class.” The next question was, “How can we do this at a systemic level?” and the star system evolved.

So I feel rewards play a huge role in sustaining a change at least in our space.

Related articles:

“Showing the way: Sikshana is helping children stay in school and better their performance by developing all-round skills”, a cover story in Business Outlook, Sep 1, 2012

Dr. Gururaj Deshpande’s insights on entrepreneurship and innovation, Jan 30, 2012 (Desh praises the interventions of Sikshana) 

Building experimentation capacity in rural schools in India: The Agastya way

“School in a lab” and “lab in a box” may seem paradoxical metaphors. However, Kuppam campus of Agastya Foundation has combined these two beautifully to create a rich learning experience for school children in rural India. In the process, Agastya has created a model which might create for the rural education what Grameen Bank has done to the micro-finance. What exactly has Agastya done? We got a glimpse of it during our memorable Kuppam visit earlier this month thanks to Dr. Shibu Shankaran and Ramji Raghavan. Here are three characteristics of Agastya-model that stood out.

Experience-first, explanation-next: Agastya has turned the learning process upside-down. How many of you remember anything about conservation of angular momentum? I don’t. However, when you sit on the swivel chair, hold the revolving cycle wheel in your hand and then turn it, you experience yourself revolving (see picture). This experience makes you much more receptive to understand the principle behind it. The whole of Kuppam campus is like a large laboratory where there are hundreds of instruments you can “play with” first.  However, what makes Agastya unique is that it has created a pedagogy (way of teaching) around it. When students come in the morning from nearby villages to the campus, they first perform experiments. Of course, you need to explain them enough for them to perform the experiment. 

Set-up without the kids 

Set-up with the kids

However, the major part of theory is taught after the experiment. On an average, a student within 30km radius of Kuppam visits the campus four times a year. And during each visit, he attends two sessions: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Isn’t four days a year too short a time? And what about the other students outside the 30km radius? Well, Agastya has thought about that too.

Agastya Hubli centre

Hub-and-spoke model: Agastya currently has 21 satellite centres spread across 10 states in India. In fact, when I visited Agastya’s Hubli centre last February I got to see the Bhishma’s chair and much more. Students in and around Hubli area visit the Hubli centre. Apart from this Agastya has created a “lab in a box” concept where instruments necessary to perform specific experiments are put in a box. And these boxes reach schools through 60+ mobile vans. Agastya is currently experimenting with a “lab in an auto” and a “lab on a bike” concepts. Making lab accessible to kids is just one part of the story. What about the teachers? Well, Agastya trains the teachers as well. However, what is perhaps even more impactful is the “young instructor leader” program. This program identifies bright students and trains them to become champions. What better way to learn than peers explaining it to you? You say, “Fine. But how is Agastya able to make scientific equipment available at low cost?” That leads to the third leg of Agastya’s model.

Build capacity to make low-cost instruments: When you are trying to reach millions of kids in several thousands of schools, cost of instruments matter. We visited the workshop in Kuppam campus where Agastya makes many of the student-friendly instruments. There were some which were made in Bangalore. Our 14 year old son said he wouldn’t mind doing an internship in the workshop.

Agastya is not claiming to be the “complete” institution. Currently, it is heavily biased towards hard sciences. Arts curriculum is just taking off. Theatre and music is nowhere to be seen. But, most importantly, Agastya is learning and innovating every day. Unlike most educational institutions in India its “idea box” is alive and breathing and language of experimentation is very much part of the culture. I wish Agastya a great future.

Lab in a box

Idea box at Agastya

Workshop for lab equipment

 Related article:

“Agastya is empowering rural India”, Ramji Raghavan’s interview at Education World, Mar 7, 2012. Ramji, the brain behind Agastya, explains the model and its impact.

Managing a big bet: Dr. Ashwin Naik of Vaatsalya shares his experience

In the innovation leadership workshop I facilitated last month, we had a panel discussion on “Managing big bets”. During this discussion we got an opportunity to listen to Dr. Ashwin Naik, CEO, Vaatsalya, Dr. Ishwar Parulkar, Chief Systems Architect, Cisco and Jayesh Badani, CEO, Ideaken. Here is a summary of our discussion with Ashwin. I will summarize the other two discussions over the next few weeks.

Dr. Ashwin Naik (second from the left in the photo) is the Co-Founder and CEO of Vaatsalya, India’s largest hospital network catering to tier-II and tier-III towns. Started in 2005, Vaatsalya hospitals today are in 17 towns in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. He shared his experience from starting of the itch to scaling the business and his guiding philosophy in working through the challenges.

You can find the interview here.

The questions that got discussed were:

1. Where did the itch begin?

2. Did you see it as a big bet right from the beginning?

3. Did you visualize that you will be in 50 towns?

4. What happened in the early phase – say in the first six months or a year?

5. Did the image of who your customer is undergo any change? If so, what change?

6. What kinds of attributes do you use today to define your customer?

7. Why do you need to segment market in healthcare? Like you said, why can’t anybody be your customer?

8. What would be a couple of turning points in this journey?

9. How did you get local practitioners to join you in a place like Hubli?

10. What are your fears?

11. Vaatsalya has innovated on the business model. But once the business model is established, does Vaatsalya have to innovate?

12. How about innovation from the customer experience dimension – from the time customer enters to when he leaves after treatment?

13. Do you ever feel like quitting? How do you handle it?

14. What are your insights on building champions in the organization?

15. Suppose an idea comes from a housekeeper. How do you ensure it is not getting killed?

Dr. Gururaj Desh Deshpande’s insights on entrepreneurship and innovation

I got an opportunity to listen to Dr. Gururaj Desh Deshpande on “Can Social innovations and Technology innovations leverage off one another?” at the IIT Alumni Club Bangalore event held at Bangalore International Centre, Domlur, last morning. It was a fantastic talk. Here are a few of the insights Desh mentioned in his talk and during Q&A:

· Concurrent innovation: In a place like MIT where Desh is a Board member, there is no dearth of technology innovations. However, for the researcher or the faculty member working on the innovation, the primary interest could be elegance and publishability – criteria that matter for tenure and impressing peer group. The challenge is to create an atmosphere where innovations get connected with relevance to create an impact. This is what Desh calls concurrent innovation where innovators get connected to the real world up front as opposed to much later in the life cycle. Over the last 10 years MIT has funded 80 projects and a third of them have generated $100 M or more.

· The sandbox for social innovations: In social sector, the equation (innovation + relevance = impact) needs to be turned around. The real challenge is in understanding the problem. Then you bring in the ideas to solve the problem. We need to create an environment where this happens systematically. 6 years ago Deshpande Foundation created a sandbox in Hubli to do that. What is this sandbox? It encompasses 5 districts: Belgaum, Dharwad, Gadag, Haveri, and Uttar Kannada, and is home to about 10 million people. Ideas / interventions that need to be proven get experimented within this sandbox first and successful ones get scaled. Help is provided in the form of access to advisory network, teaching, additional resources from corporate / NGOs and of course, grants. Akshayapatra (mid-day meals), Karadi Path (learning through Karadi Tales), Agasthya Foundation (sparking creativity in rural India), Sikshana Foundation (improves quality of teaching in Govt schools) are some of the organizations that were incubated in the Hubli sandbox.

· Sustainability of social ventures: In many social ventures, the beneficiary does not have buying power (e.g. mid-day meal in state schools). Hence, there is a donor. Every time the donor wants to add value to the organization, he projects his risk tolerance on the project. Unfortunately, from his standard of living, he finds everything risky. Very quickly the product does not cater to the requirements. The idea is to take the performing assets, scale them and make them sustainable. i.e. find those interventions that are already working and scale them.

There are three ways a social venture becomes sustainable: (1) By becoming part of free market economy (2) By becoming part of Govt & (3) By supported through broad based charity as opposed to funded by a few rich people. Sometimes it is a combination of the three. For example, Akshaypatra combines (2) and (3).

· Role of value system in innovation: Entrepreneurship or innovation is just a tool. It allows you to do something faster and better. It quite doesn’t say whether it is for the good of the world or for the bad of the world. So you need a value system on top of it. That is a bigger issue we need to resolve. World economy is based on consumption. In the 70s there used to be a debate between capitalism and socialism. About 10 years ago, it looked like capitalism all the way. But now we are beginning to see cracks within capitalism. Consumption based economy means everybody has to consume more and more and more which will just rip apart this whole world. There will be nothing left. So the bigger challenge is to re-think on what winning means. Does winning include sustainability, goodness? Etc. In some area where we see this happening. For example, in energy, 10 years ago it was all about producing more energy. Now, people are realizing that the low-hanging fruits in energy are efficiency and savings and you could save up to 40-50%. Now there are 50 startups in Boston area and another 50 in Silicon Valley who are trying to figure out how they can get access to the low-hanging fruit – efficiency. People are building huge database of every building and then you do audit on a building and show what you can do to achieve how much saving.

· Role of technology in education: Majority of school going kids in India still don’t have access to computers and Internet. In fact, a lot of little things like eraser, pencil, 5-10 pieces of paper, old newspaper (acts as a reading material) have much bigger impact than the computers (For example, see “spot prizes” intervention of Sikshana Foundation – it is the oldest and most popular activity). This is not to say computers are not useful. It is just that getting tablets to villages and putting them to use is a little unrealistic at this point. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to experiment on these things. One of the best experiments Desh has seen being carried out in a few California schools is as follows: Suppose you want to teach Pythagoras theorem, then the students will be asked see Khan Academy video in the evening at home and come and do the homework in the school the next day. It is changing the whole paradigm. You need a lot of interaction / debate / discussion during the homework. There are going to be a lot of innovative ways of educating each other. In Desh’s opinion, the biggest problem in education is always inspiring kids to want to learn. So any intervention that inspires kids to want to learn is going to create significant value. Technology has been trying to intervene in education for a long time. But it hasn’t. Next 10 years are going to be exciting. MIT just announced a new initiative – MITx - which will offer certification through free online courseware.

Sources:

Photo from thehindu.com

Gyanesh Pandey tells Husk Power Systems story of Bijli from Bhoosa

I got an opportunity to listen to Gyanesh Pandey, CEO of Husk Power Systems in IIM Bangalore last month. I don’t know why but I find the HPS story of producing Bijli from Bhoosa (electricity from husk) fascinating. And listening to the story from Gyanesh increased my fascination even further. Based out of Bihar, HPS is doing to eradicate needless darkness in rural India what Aravind Eye Hospital has done for eradicating needless blindness. It has so far electrified 450 villages / hamlets (mostly off-grid) in Bihar & UP. I have tried to condense the narrative below by keeping Gyanesh’s language as much as possible. You can find the fuller version of the story here.

I grew up hating my place (in North Bihar). Nothing made sense to me. Every single thing in the village costs you a little more, quality is poorer and people are lethargic. During holidays, I reluctantly came home from the boarding school. I tried to find reasons for not coming home. I could feel the depression all around.

I ended up becoming an engineer and going to the US for higher studies. During my PhD I came home to attend my sister’s wedding. On one of those evenings with the extended family members I was telling them stories of America. Naively I ended up saying, “It’s hard to tell you guys – You can’t even dream of how it is (in the US)”. I didn’t mean to offend anyone. However, an old guy in the room said, “For us, it will always be a dream. Because people like you will always maintain a distance from us.” I don’t know what he meant, but his words resonated somehow somewhere with me. This was 2001.

I automatically assumed that something is not being done because technology for doing it doesn’t exist. This was a big mistake. For the next 5 years, I partnered with Ratnesh Yahav, my best friend from childhood and experimented with several leading edge technologies like polymer solar cells, fuel cells, micro-tidal energy and finally Jatropha based bio-diesel. All of them failed. By 2006 I was back to Bihar from the US and badly depressed after the Jatropha project failure.

At this point, I got an appointment to see a director at the Renewable Energy Development Agency. He asked me, “How are you going to electrify villages?” I said, “I don’t know. I will do something”. He hit a buzzer and called the peon. “Call the guy who just left the room” Then he told me, “Talk to him. He sells gasifiers. Why don’t you use something like that?” I knew biomass gasification was an old technology developed by Hitler for wartime. People don’t use it anymore. The dealer told me that there were 40 gasifiers being used in Bihar. I said, “Wow!” He thought I am an NRI and he was trying to sell gasifiers to me.

The gasifiers were running on rice husk. 40% diesel and 60% gas – what is called dual-fuel mode. I came home after talking to him and worked out the math. I realized that 40% diesel model would not be economical. I started thinking, “Why can’t we use 100% gas?”

I started by finding out all I could on gasification based power generation. I found a paper from IISc and it said you can’t run an engine only on producer gas. Gasification is where you burn a biomass that generates a certain mixture of carbon monoxide and nitrogen and that mixture is combustible and becomes fuel. IIT Delhi had done a project. However, I couldn’t find a single instance where anybody said, “It has worked”. I tried to talk to a professor and he wasn’t even willing to talk to me. I just knew that all these people are wrong. I had no reason why.

At this point a scientist from MNRE, Mr. S K Singh encouraged me. Singh helped getting me hooked with a small engine maker from Agra. This was in June 2007. By August 15, 2007 we had a working system. We had electrified our first village. Soon after this we put out 2 systems electrifying 5 villages. By then we were out of money.

How did Gyanesh-Ratnesh manage to raise money? How does HPS business model work? How did they do the pricing? You can find the full story here.

In photo: Prof. Abhoy Ojha of IIMB (left) along with Gyanesh Pandey.

Managing innovation: journey of Tanishq, jewelry division of Titan

I got an opportunity to listen to Mr. L. R. Natarajan (LRN), head of innovation council at Titan and Chief Manufacturing Officer of Tanishq, Titan’s jewelry division. He was one of the guest speakers at our workshop on innovation management at IIM Bangalore. The first thing you notice about LRN is the passion he carries for building a culture of innovation. After listening to the seven year journey LRN presented, most of us felt, “There is a lot more we can do in my organization”. What kinds of innovation management practices are followed at Tanishq? Here is a short summary.

“What’s new” campaign (2004): The journey at Tanishq began in 2004 where each of the 14 manufacturing departments was given a structured white board. Each team was supposed to write “What’s new” they are attempting on the whiteboard given to them. Competitive spirit was created by defining a review process and attaching rewards. This simple and effective process is still active after seven years of its launch.

Dreaming workshop & HOD fund (2006): In 2006, Titan had a workshop called “future shock” in which the MD asked 600 managers to dream about “Where do you see Titan 5 years down the road?” More than 130 new business ideas were generated. Through a selection process they were narrowed down to 2 new brands to be launched: Goldplus and Eyeplus.

“HOD fund” was initiated after observing that purchase of any capital item goes through a long chain of approvals – Sr. Manager, Deputy GM, GM, VP, COO, Corporate finance, Corp purchase & finally MD. By then the person who initiated the process loses interest. HOD fund created a shorter route for innovative ideas. Each Head of the Dept (HOD) was given a budget of upto Rs. 1 Lakh which he can approve himself.

Innovation school of management (2008): Between 2004 and 2008, many ideas got implemented. However, a closer look revealed that ideas had come from only 10% of the employees. Innovation school of management was started to involve every employee in this journey. A six month course was created and a written test & viva were conducted to select the first batch of 30 participants. For the first 3 days, the participants are taught about what, why and tools and techniques on how to think creatively. Then they were given a challenge to work on. If the inventory is 1 crore the challenge could be “How can we manage with 10 lakh inventory?” All HODs are trained mentors and they mentor the participants. Each participant is given 6 hrs per week to work on the challenge. There is a review once a month. At the end of the course, the MD hands over the certificates. The goal is to have all the employees as trained innovators by 2014-15. So far 187 out of 400 employees in the factory have been certified through the school.

Currently innovation group in Tanishq has 9 full-time members with 1 division manager, 3 managers and 5 executives.

3 success stories: (out of several LRN presented)

1.      Diamond setting: The process for preparing the casting mould was improved so that a highly skilled job of diamond setting becomes easier. In place of 100 to 150 stones a karigar is now setting 1500 stones every day. This process improvement idea has been patented.

2.      Diamond bagging: Diamond bagging is a process of starting with a work order, picking the right set of diamonds from hundred different varieties, putting it in a bag and giving it to the production to put it in the necklace. The idea of automating this process came from the theme that was launched in 2007: “Simplify and automate”. After about 4 years of working closely with the machine building division, a robotic arm was created that automated diamond bagging. This may be first time diamond bagging got automated in the world.

3.      Gold out of stone: Hard silicon carbide crucibles were lying around the factory. People knew that these might contain gold. However, people didn’t know what to do. One day, Rajsekhar, one of the operators got a road-roller from his neighbor and crushed the crucibles. About four and a half kilos of gold was recovered.

Maganlal Gandhi: Mahatma Gandhi’s innovation partner

"He [Maganlal] was, in my opinion, a genius... He laid the foundation of the science of Khadi by writing his Vanat Shastra” said Mahatma Gandhi at the inaugural ceremony of Magan Museum of Khadi (pdf) at Wardha on Dec 30, 1938². Ever since I read this, I became curious about Maganlal Gandhi. Where did Maganlal learn the science of khadi? Was this science backed up by rigorous experiments? If so, where did Maganlal perform those experiments? I wanted to find out. Finally, I got a peek into the story when my friend Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan connected me to Prof. Shambu Prasad of XIMB Bhubaneswar. Shambu has done extensive research on science of Gandhi. I found answers to some of my questions in an excellent article written by Shambu “Gandhi and Maganlal: Khadi science and the Gandhian scientist”. Here is a short summary.

Maganlal Khushalchand Gandhi (1883-1928) was Gandhi’s nephew (a grandson of his uncle) and 19 years younger to him. Maganlal met Gandhi in 1902, two days before Gandhi was to leave for South Africa. Maganlal was then on the lookout for a job in his native Kathiawar. Gandhi asked Maganlal to come to South Africa offering it as a land of opportunities with ample scope for growth. Maganlal was immediately put into business and was running a family shop of the Gandhis. When Gandhi quit his practice and decided to set-up a farm and take to farming as an occupation, Maganlal was the first to join him unconditionally knowing it involves self-imposed poverty.

In a short time, Maganlal picked up several skills at Phoenix Farm - composing and running the machines in the press, farming, carpentry and tailoring, keeping accounts of the settlement and teaching the children Gujarati and Mathematics. It was Maganlal who suggested the name Sadagraha to Gandhiji when he solicited a better term for “passive resistance” in the local newspaper Indian Opinion. Gandhi later modified Sadagraha to Satyagraha.

Later in India, Maganlal set-up and ran the khadi laboratory at Sabarmati Ashram as he was the head of the Technical Department of the All India Khadi Board (later the All India Spinners Association). Maganlal traveled to Madras Presidency to learn the art. The technical department of the Ashram, tested several samples of yarn (over 300 every month) and gave feedback to the Provincial Congress Committees. These results were widely reported regularly in Young India and Navjivan. As a resource centre in the field of khadi the Ashram used to send its staff, spindles, specimens of yarn, and charts explaining the effect of the wheel to exhibitions all over the country. Gandhi relied on Maganlal to test the various machines and always wanted Maganlal’s opinion on technical developments whether it was Mirabehn’s discovery of the soft spindle, Shankarlal’s Gandiva spinning wheel or the Ramachandra lift pump.

In 1922, a ‘Khaddar Information Bureau’ was constituted to provide or collect information on khadi from the provinces, to inform congress committees and selected workers on reports from the centres. Maganlal edited its ‘Khadi Bulletin’. A syllabus was formulated in 1923 for the weaving school with a regular six-month course. A khaddar service scheme was also instituted under which 600 instructors were to be trained in home carding.

Maganlal passed away while at work in Bihar due to typhoid on April 23, 1928, at the peak of his life and that of the khadi movement. In a moving tribute, titled ‘My Best Comrade Gone’ Gandhi remarked that: ‘The world knows so little of how much my so-called greatness depends upon the incessant toil and drudgery of silent, devoted, able and pure workers, men as well as women. And among them all Maganlal was to me the greatest, the best and the purest.’

Source:

1. Gandhi and Maganlal: Khadi science and the Gandhian scientist” by Shambu Prasad, Presented at the Seminar ‘Gandhi and his Contemporaries’ held at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, April 13-15, 1999

2. “Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Gandhi” by D. G. Tendulkar, volume 5, page 6.

3. Maganlal’s photo is from "Magan Nivas" at Sabarmati Ashram.

Managing innovation: story of Tesco India

Last week I got an opportunity to listen to Sandeep Dhar, CEO of Tesco Hindustan Service Centre (HSC) on how Tesco India manages innovation at CII Innovation Forum. Tesco is the third largest retailer in the world by revenue and the second largest in terms of profits. Tesco HSC is responsible for standardizing all back-office processes impacting Tesco business globally and it currently employs 4000 associates. Sandeep demonstrated with examples how Tesco has made innovation an every day practice. How is it different from other places? Let’s see in this article.

Idea qualification: At Tesco, like everywhere else, every idea needs to have a business case which typically means cost saving for an idea from HSC. However, at Tesco, it needs to meet two additional criteria: One, it should improve or maintain customer experience. Two, it should simplify or at least maintain employee work complexity. Several ideas end up getting dropped for not meeting these criteria.

Continuous improvement track: Small ideas are taken seriously at Tesco. In fact, if an idea can reduce average time taken to handle a customer at the TIL by one second, it saves the company 2 million pounds a year in UK alone. How to keep people motivated for doing continuous improvement? At Tesco HSC this is ensured by how the team KPI or SLAs are set. For example, there is a team in India which receives calls when particular equipment like a refrigerator or air-conditioning unit is malfunctioning. Team’s job is to call the relevant vendor of the town and the vendor would send people to the Tesco store for servicing. Typical KPIs of such call-centric team would be percentage of calls serviced in 90 seconds, percentage calls tracked to closure etc. With these metric the improvements would be directed towards improving the efficiency of handling calls. They deliver limited value. Tesco changed the KPI of the team to “reduce the amount of money Tesco spends on maintenance”. With this the orientation of the team changed. They started looking into the reasons for equipment failures, some of the early warning and on preventive maintenance measures. Two years after this change the maintenance budget has come down by 40 percent.

Another team in India is responsible for making payments for the traffic violations of the truck drivers carrying Tesco supplies. Typical KPI would be timely payment of the fine and the accuracy of the payment. This KPI was changed to “figure out ways to reduce the fine”. One of the team members visited the traffic authority web site and found out a mechanism to challenge the fines. He and a couple of his colleagues started looking into the data and started challenging the fines selectively. At times the challenge would be successful, at times it wouldn’t. Then the team went one step further and analyzed the reasons for the traffic violations. They identified some commonly made mistakes and sent the information to the drivers. They were able to identify drivers who were more prone to making traffic violations.

Problem solving track: This is the track where the businesses are asked to share some of their chronic problems. Tesco India sets up cross functional teams to work on them. One such problem was related to Tesco’s online website. Tesco is world’s largest e-grocer. The web site has a favorites list which currently includes all the items a customer had shopped in the past. The drawback of this mechanism was that the favorites list becomes very long and inconvenient for the shopper. A Tesco India team worked with IISc experts and came up with a statistical algorithm that predicts what a shopper might be shopping on a day. For example, if you have purchased 3 gallons of milk on Monday, it would not show milk in favorites on Tuesday. But it may show it on Friday. This has resulted in reducing the favorites list to one third of the original size. This has been piloted and going into production.

In-store work experience: All managers in India go through Tesco Week in Store Together (TWIST) program whenever they visit a country with Tesco stores. For Sandeep a TWIST a year is mandatory. He said if he doesn’t spend a week working the store, his KPI goes down by a notch. When Sandeep spends a week in the store, he may spend a day at check-out counter, another day stacking products, third day he may be doing stock count, on the fourth day he may be going out with the delivery van.

Retail test lab: In 2007, Tesco HSC established retail test lab where recreated all hardware environments that exists in different Tesco stores. For example, sales counters and handheld devices etc. When IT develops a software it is tested in this simulated environment which improves the reliability of the deployment.