Sahil Kakepoto

Turning Frustration Into Innovation:  Sterling Hawkins, a tech entrepreneur, believes “innovation is not about money, good ideas or who you know. It is about discomfort”. His speech was intriguing because it put forward an entirely new concept when it comes to developing state of the art kind of products / services. Typically, a futuristic idea always makes majority of the people uncomfortable due to their fear of change. The kind of risk associated with such breakthrough is always uncomfortable. Despite witnessing such breakthroughs in recent years, general assumption is that such successes are result of luck. Well luck can never be a good business strategy instead it is just our excuse to be playing in the safe zone. The main hurdle in the way of innovation is our own discomfort and when such discomfort is embraced by a person then only he/she can unlock great achievements.

Our approach to innovation is dead wrong: Diana Kander in her TED talk, “our approach to innovation is dead wrong” addresses how business schools fail to produce successful entrepreneurs. She linked this with her own personal experience that she faced when she was 17. The fear of being attacked led her to learn martial art and when that unpleasant fear became reality at the parking lot of the back of the restaurant where she worked. She was unable to fight against the attacker despite being the green belt and all the training that she took. The main purpose of telling this story was to highlight that many business schools don’t really prepare students for the real-world challenges when it comes to starting a venture in the same way her self-defense classes failed to equip her with the right training. She explained how flawed the training was as she was trained to fight against same size opponent in a controlled environment which is far from the reality. Similarly, business courses teac...

Speed up Innovation with Design Thinking: Everyone loves to talk about innovation but few know how to achieve it. In a company, some goes to the upper management or the board with a innovative new idea but he is shot down with the first question which is usually that how much will it cost. Followed by this question is usually that how much return is expected. After that, they ask how long will it take and also what will the competition do and so on. Organizations which are determined to innovate should have the vision which architects, designers and artists work. They initiate with a sketch, show it to others, get their feedback and sketch again. This approach of design thinking can be used by anyone. There are four ways to innovate like a designer; just start, team up, think in terms of option, and make things, break things and visualize things. Just start and do not wait to settle on plans and budgets. Team up and never make the innovation in process alone. Do not think about solutio...

Creative thinking - how to get out of the box and generate ideas:  We often discover ourselves in a safe and secure place, however, in order to innovate we must take risks. If we always stay inside our comfort zone then we will never be able to think out of the box. Once we leave our safe bubble our thoughts will never be the same. The question is whether why we should leave our comfort zone and risk our business to fall in an unknown zone? The answer is simply that in order to be creative in a true sense, one must push himself out of the safe bubble and make oneself think about what we really want to do. Our experience and our knowledge makes us what we are, however, it builds a wall surrounding our comfort zone. When we try something new, some knowledge and our usual ideas do not fit together and thus we enter a new place which is unknown to us. Most of the people will decide to go back in the safe bubble and discard the "new". So, one should jump in the "new" and...