Story of Gandhi’s 1920 Charkha challenge: A critical look

Vinoba Bhave carried an experiment for a year in 1916 in Nalwadi, Wardha to check the earning productivity of charkha spinning¹. He concluded that the maximum earning per day of a person cannot be more than two annas. Gandhi realized that this had to be significantly more. Hence, he announced an open challenge to design an improved charkha in 1920. How was the response to this challenge? What kind of ideas came? What was the outcome? To study this, I spent some time going through the Young India issues of 1920 at the archive section of Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad last July. In this article I will summarize the story first and then review the process of managing the challenge based on the 4 parameters Prof. Karl Ulrich of Wharton School has articulated in the book “Innovation tournament”.

4 choices in the design of an innovation campaign

Whether it is the Charkha challenge of Gandhi in 1920s or the Ansari X-Prize challenge of 1990s related to spacecraft development, innovation campaigns have played big role in fostering innovation. What kinds of choices are involved in designing an innovation campaign? Prof. Christian Terwiesch and Prof. Karl Ulrich of Wharton School have presented following 4 design choices in their book “Innovation tournaments: Creating and selecting exceptional opportunities”.

4 characteristics of Einstein’s approach to theory building which I found useful

I don’t know why but Einstein’s approach to theory building fascinates me. I have been going back to his biographies from time to time for the past few years. I don’t understand the mathematics of relativity or quantum mechanics. Hence, my understanding about his approach is limited. However, I feel that certain aspects of Einstein’s approach to theory building are accessible to more people. Here are 4 characteristics that I have found useful in my research work which is done jointly with Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan.

Catalign Quarterly - December 2012

Design Thinking

Catalign Quarterly is an attempt to put together insights relevant for fostering a culture of innovation in organizations – both for-profit and not-for-profit. Through articles and interviews we explore principles, practices and policies that help organizations become more innovative.

Theme for this quarterly is “Design thinking” – an approach to problem solving that emphasizes empathy, rapid prototyping, process focus and cross-functional collaboration. The main article, 4 tenets of design thinking, explores each of the 4 dimensions.

4 things that impressed me in Prof. Karl Ulrich’s design course at Coursera

ice-cream-scoop-design-by-prof-karl-ulrichfrom vpdabholkar

Ice cream scoop design by Prof. Karl Ulrich from vpdabholkar

Yesterday I finished evaluating the beta prototypes of 5 of my peers and that finishes my 8 week long course “Design: Creation of artifacts in society” taught by Prof. Karl Ulrich of Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania at coursera.org. I enrolled for this free course more out of curiosity. However, the expectations were so-so. I make a living helping people innovate effectively and I thought I would know most of the stuff. Browsing through the textbook written by the instructor (Ulrich) prior to the course only strengthened this feeling. Today I am glad I did the course and I feel I was so wrong about how much I would learn in the process. The experience just blew me off! Here are 4 things that really impressed me about this course.

4 tenets of design thinking

Design thinking (DT) means different things to different people. Here I would like to present my view of 4 core tenets of DT. This view is influenced by various champions of DT such as D-schools at Stanford and Potsdam (especially Lakshman Pachineela & Prof. Ulrich Winberg), Prof. Karl Ulrich of Wharton, Ideo folks (Kelley brothers: David & Tom, Tim Brown), Gandhi, Steve Jobs, and of course, my own experience as a practitioner and an educator.

4 ways to improve the performance of innovation tournaments

Organizing contests to generate a blockbuster idea or a few best ideas is not a novel concept. You may be familiar with campaigns such as GE’s ecomagination challenge or Economic Times’ “Power of Ideas”. Similarly idea campaigns have been an integral part of innovation programs of various organizations including Cognizant, Intuit, Titan etc. Question is: How do you ensure or at least increase the chance of getting a blockbuster idea through such a campaign? What are the levers that improve the performance of idea campaigns? Prof. Karl Ulrich of Wharton School calls such campaigns innovation tournaments. He along with Prof. Christian Terwiesch (also of Wharton) has written a book titled “Innovation tournament: Creating and selecting exceptional opportunities” that addresses these questions. In this article, let’s look at the 4 levers from the book that Ulrich presents in the Wharton lecture shown above. First let’s start with a definition of innovation tournament.