My Views on Incubation Centers

My Views on Incubation Centers

With a me too attitude across many technical schools and Management institutes, the essence behind incubation concept is getting lost in the rat race to create entrepreneurs.

My personal views on incubators are as follows.

1) Incubators work fine if they work like one (incubation for a new born lasts for weeks, maximum months definitely not years) Any longer and they become Business Centers.
2)Incubation work if I get mentoring by people who have done it before (failure/success are relative terms.. After Success you discover many relatives.. ;)
3)Incubates work if they (entrepreneurs) do not get shielded from failure... on the contrary .. It makes more sense if incubates face the mirror of life/failure early so that they can burn less cash and do course correction fast, real fast.
4) Incubation will work if it is done by Academicians/faculty who are willing to lower their ego and become facilitators between incubates and partners in industry/markets.
Else incubation is a sure, deterministic step towards failure.

Do feel free to comment on these views.

Outsourcing V/S Global Resource Leverage

• How would you introduce a concept like Outsourcing into your company??
• “The Shock and Awe about Outsourcing is to an extent a knee jerk reaction by few by their own insecurites or limitations, with fear that cost being the primary criteria for "outsourcing" rather than doing what is best for the company.
  
• Mind you, I am not talking for or against it, but the decision should be looked at the long term strategic benefit for the company and not just look at "operational benefits" of the same.
  
• Can a educational institution outsource "teaching". May be not but should it be willing to welcome "Industry Professionals" as "Visiting Faculty" to give an Industrial richness to the curriculum. Definitely Yes
• The concept of outsourcing is a logical extension of the concept of "body Shopping" as what came in, is now going out.
  
• The concept which is much deeper is the concept of Global Resource leverage.
  
• The world is not bound by geographical boundaries any more, you produce where it is cheapest to do that, use resources where it can be leveraged and sell it where you can make the most margin.
  
• The quality has to be world class as your competition may not be not the pop and mom store next door or the Behemoth in the city centre but could a small pop and mom store in China or India who using the world class logistics of the global supply chain can sell services and products at a much cheaper rate than what can be produced locally.
  
• Highlighting the benefits of global economy, like reduced cost of goods consumed in local economy, ability of companies to profit from the new consumption centres in BRIC countries, could help employees to appreciate it as an beneficial trend rather than a disruptive one.
  
• Lot of Companies also do an "immersion" exercise where middle level managers are exposed to BRIC countries by field visits and ability to look at the possibilities in these states rather than look at the negatives.
  
• Such immersion exercises allow employees to understand the concept of Global Resource Leverage.”

Consultant = Narad Muni

• How do u start a company and what is it that one should do to make the same successful? (Consulting Firm )
• “I have a very different take on "Consulting Companies".
  
• I believe that a "Consultant" privilege is granted by those who take the Consulting Service and not who gives them. Just like a "Guru" is a title given and not asked for/seeked/demanded.
  
• Typically for me A Consultant transforms through three stages. 1)Seeker (Problem Provider) 2)Solver (Solution Provider) and 3)Adviser (Consultant).
  
• When I focus on a domain and use the current solutions in a domain, I go through Data/Information which allows be to find "Problems" to solve.
  
• When Companies in the Solutions space provide expertise to solve certain problems, they transcend the instance and solve a "Generic Problem"
  
• When my Generic Solutions are "Insights" for usage across Industries and organizational processes, I am ready for the society to accept me as "Consultant"
  
• So as stated, I believe when we "Listen" to problems, "Practice" the solutions and "Contribute" our insights, We can be considered a consultant.
  
• So to be a successful Consultant: Listen, Practice and Contribute.”
• 
  

Some Queries - Some Answers

• How do we differentiate between Startup and a mid-sized company?

  • “According to the EU Research , one of the worlds most active Funding agencies for Innovations, a startup with headcount of Less than 250 people is a SME, Less than 50 people is a small Enterprise, and Less than 10 people is a Micro enterprise. Based on Revenue, the Captial Ceiling is 50 million Euro, 10 million Euro and 2 million Euro respectively.”

• Have you ever been "LET GO" from a company and felt blind-sided?

  • “Letting GO can happen according to me for 4 inter related reasons, Economic, Social, Political and Competence. Not all LET GO are for performance/competency related, some of them are also Economic, whereby companies cannot keep pace with "fast performers" and hence to maintain the social equilibrium within any system have to play a Political game and Let GO. Overall the system benefits as low performers get a "wake up call" and high performers are released into the "ecosystem". It is a Kruger(Jungle) out there.”

• Virtual Businesses

• Check out the concept of Micro Multinational. A term propagated in the western media and being highlighted in the next couple of books by Prof C K Prahalad is "Global Resource Leverage" with a centre at Ross School of Business, UMich and India Centre at iiit-b Some of the Indian names in this spectrum include Solidcore by Rosen Sharma in Pune, Globals Inc by Suhas Gopinath in Bangalore”

• When to use Orkut or LinkedIn or Facebook

  
  

  • “All these social based networking sites are an online version of the old traditional societal community replicas on the web. As more and more people are getting onto the virtual world, they need a place to communicate, meet and socialize. As the person is virtual, credentials of the person or his/her "persona" get created in this Virtual world, popularly known in India as "Mayajal".
    
  • Linkedin is a networking/credential building community for business/professional setup.
  • Orkut is from a social/youth site which helps you locate old friends and explore new ones.
    
  • Facebook is more of a community for creating an online persona for you, an "Avataar" if I may say so.
    
  • Have a Visual presence in the virtual world Use them for building up your brand or communicating more about yourself in short marking your presence/existence in the online world”

Imagination and Creativity @Ignition 07 at NIT K

Was invited to NIT Surathkal (previously KREC) to undertake a workshop on Entrepreneurship. 8th September 2007.

The workshop was planned as a whole day event called Ignition 07, planned by E-Forea (Ecell of NIT-K).

The workshop started with a key note by Ms Alka Goyal, VP Tavant Technologies and Founder Social way.

Our sessions started with the "Birthday Exercise" which had an excellent response.

The fact that 47 people in a crowd of 165+ shared their birthdays, reinforced the belief that at the heart of heart we are not that unique or different from one another as we expect to be.

Followed this workshop with a "Trigger your Imagination Game" where people were asked to come with unique offerings/services/products from "two pieces of A4 size paper".

The imagination and enthusiasm of the crowd was to be seen to be believed. Some of the products which were dreamed were e-lottery, Degree Certificates, Auctions of Legendary Painters like Picasso, Ozone cutting ball.

Also had a great learning that we have made our education system so rigid that any "game based" teaching is perceived to be non formal and hence non serious, found that the students missed taking notes and hence were slow in appreciating that "entrepreneurship is everywhere concept"

Did an immediate course correction with 13 slides on Seven Domains of "Road Test your business Idea" and lead it towards the "Bad Idea - Good Idea" Game.

This was the highlight of the evening with an excellent response and witty exchanges between the ideas ( both bad and good) and all of us realized that there are no bad ideas and Any Bad Idea which has a customer is a Good Idea.

Have we lost the eye for spotting talent ?

Selection or Elimination; Potential or Laurels.

When we choose a candidate for any job/career, what do we choose him for?

Do we look at what he can bring to the table! what he can help us achieve! How he can gain Value!

or

How he has gained that one mark more than his fellow "passenger"?

Would non academic but innovative brilliant minds (like Steve Jobs) fared in the indian system?

What do we look at his records for?

I hope that we take our decisions based on the future and not on the past. Lets judge people on what they can potentially do and not be too finicky about the past laurels.

We do not want him to sit on them, Do we?

So lets hope that we spot the spark and not focus on the source of IT.

Swiss Knife V/S Paring Knife

Product Features v/s Requirement

When we envision a product to suffice a need in the market place, what is the threshold, the limit beyond which if we tread we miss the point .

Most of our IT products are "packed" with features or Functions which the customer never uses/wants.

We assume that he would need it but he never does.

Take the case of any word package, most of the times we hardly use 20% of the features of the package, or for that matter our CPU utilization is hardly 25 to 30% at the max.

So are we making our products overtly complex?, unusable feature packed? and thereby increasing the cost of ownership?

As to include all such "unwanted" features, we would have cost overrun to the project, time delays and increased cost on account of a longer development time.

So are we selling a Swiss Knife ( multi utility knife) when the customer needs/wants only a "paring" knife.

Point to Ponder, Mr Dump.