Pole-vault in the age of disruption – Nandan Nilekani at AIMA

Nandan Nilekani, Co-Founder, Infosys & the catalyst of digitisation in India, addressing AIMA’s 63rd Foundation Day 2019. Read Excerpts –

Nandan Nilekani addressing AIMA's 63rd Foundation Day.

Nandan Nilekani addressing AIMA’s 63rd Foundation Day.

I think the topic – Innovation in the age of disruption – is very important. We tend to think that innovation is about 23-year olds wearing hoodies doing things, but in some sense, the innovation in India is happening by everybody at all levels. Innovation can happen in the private sector, the public sector, whether you are young, whether you are old, it really doesn’t matter. It is really the mindset of bringing new ideas into play. Ideas are really what makes a difference, and if you are able to get your ideas and get them embedded in the system, then anything can happen.

Innovation can come from anyone whether they are incumbents, challengers, young or old, in the private sector or in government; and I think that’s the spirit in which we need to think of innovation in this age of disruption because clearly disruption is a given, the velocity of change is unprecedented. Technology and many things are causing velocity, that we have never seen before, the knowledge accumulation is happening at a phenomenal pace, more knowledge was created in the last six months then the previous thousands of years, we are seeing the rise of data in unprecedented ways, we’re seeing companies accumulate huge amounts of data, thanks to smartphones they are using more data and tomorrow as we sensorize the world as every device every car everything has a sensor, then the data is going to be even further bigger than what it is today.

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Transforming Nations – Paul E Jacobs at US India Conference

AIMA in its endeavour to promote innovative and global management thinking among Indian enterprises, organised the US-India Conference in association with Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley on 8th July, 2016 on the theme ‘Managing India’s Growing Role in the Global Economy : Opportunities for India-US Partnership’ in California, USA.

Below is an excerpt from an informative speech of Paul E Jacobs, Executive Chairman, Qualcomm Inc at US-India Conference 2016 on ‘Transforming Nations – Empowering people with knowledge and technology’.

Paul E Jacobs speaking at US-India Conference 2016

Paul E Jacobs, Executive Chairman, Qualcomm speaking at US-India Conference 2016

“Thanks everybody. Preetha and I know each other for quite some time actually due to the US-India CEO forum. We have  had lots of good discussions about how to use mobile for health care and we’re going to find some really good projects to do together so  we have been working at it but

Qualcomm has been in India for quite some time and it really is very important for us. I thought in the context of this Conference and session, just talking about how mobile technology really has been a catalyst for change, an opportunity for partnership, and it’s not a theoretical thing it’s something that we have long history doing and I am going to show you some historical information about what happened in India that made fundamental changes in the way that people were able to interact with each other and interact with the world around them for all sorts of your positive reasons. You must have heard some statistics already in terms of the reach of wireless technology. I am sure that everybody in this room has a smartphone and probably most of these Smartphones have a Qualcomm chip in them and almost certainly that chip has content that was designed in India. So almost certainly all of you are carrying around some technology that was designed in India and you use it every single day and your life pretty much depends on it.

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Smart India – Gen Bikram Singh at AIMA’s 60th Foundation Day

AIMA celebrated its 60th Foundation Day & 10th National Management Day on 20th February 2016 at Hotel Le Meridien, New Delhi. The theme of the celebrations was “Smart India”General Bikram Singh, PVSM, UYSM, AVSM, SM, VSM (Retired), Former Chief of the Indian Army & Chairman, Chiefs of Staff was the Chief Guest. Below is an excerpt of his speech on ‘Smart India’.

General Bikram Singh, PVSM, UYSM, AVSM, SM, VSM (Retired), Former Chief of the Indian Army & Chairman Chiefs of Staff addressing the Inaugural session.

General Bikram Singh, PVSM, UYSM, AVSM, SM, VSM (Retired), Former Chief of the Indian Army & Chairman Chiefs of Staff addressing the Inaugural session.

I have been associated with  AIMA for a while now and this is the third time I am here. One of the reasons for accepting this opportunity to be here today is also the theme ‘Smart India’. To a soldier, anything that talks about enhancing the honor and prestige of India is something which is very appealing and the event theme  ‘smart India’ is indeed very appealing. I am sure, not only to a soldier but to all of us.

 As a soldier when I envision the Smart India dream, which has been annunciated by our honorable Prime Minister, the foundation of this dream hinges on technology. It hinges on the digital India. But I think we need to take up more holistic view of this entire dream.To convert it into reality, I feel there are three prongs of the strategy which have got to be borne in mind. The first one is creating the Ecosystem, the environment which is smart. Second, we have to ensure that we have to be able to monitor and manage this environment through E-governance and the last but not the least which we tend to forget is that, this entire dream has got to be transformed into reality by all of us, by the nation. We got to train our leaders, managers and skill the people to make sure that this dream comes true. Therefore, the transformation hinges on all of us.

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42nd National Management Convention: Disruptive Innovation

Excerpt from an insightful speech by D Shivakumar, Chairman & CEO – India Region, PepsiCo India Holdings Pvt Ltd at AIMA’s 42nd National Management Convention held on 30th September – 1st October 2015 at Hotel Taj Palace, New Delhi. The theme for this session was “Disruptive Innovation: Winning By Changing The Rules”.

“Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. It’s always a pleasure to come for an AIMA National Management Convention. My experience of disruptive innovation is from my own career, working in Hindustan lever when we tried to make accessible and affordable categories like shampoo, face cream, detergent, baby care products etc, for the bottom of the pyramid. Then in Nokia, we made technology which was completely new to the world and accessible in a country like India, we went from something like 80 million subscribers to 900 million subscribers. That was the fundamental shift and now on the new journey of health and wellness platform. So what is disruptive innovation? What examples have we seen over the last decade of disruptive innovation and what we’ll see in the future?

D Shivakumar, Chairman & CEO - PepsiCo India addressing AIMA's 42nd NMC

D Shivakumar, Chairman & CEO – PepsiCo India addressing AIMA’s 42nd NMC

Disruptive Innovation is about creating new value! You can create new value through new price point, new quality point, a time dimension, so fundamentally creating new value in any market is a disruptive innovation. You create new market itself. Mobile phones created a new market; tablets are creating a new market, a market which did not exist before. Suddenly you bring something which is a new to the market. Most of the disruptive innovation is led by technology that’s what we have seen and when new entrants come into the market, they do not have old cost. The old costs of legacy players are completely disrupted by these new people with new business models. We have seen this in steel and every other industry. New players tend to have cost structure which is significantly lower and hence their business models are different. Then in the technology world, we see the concept of freemium, everything goes free but they make money somewhere else. So what do you do? How do you compete with something which is free? That is the disruptive innovation.

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National Leadership Conclave 2015 – Nishant Rao of LinkedIn India

Nishant Rao addressing

Nishant Rao addressing AIMA’s NLC

“Thank you so much for having me here. It’s an honor to be here among such distinguished panelists and an audience like this. I have been in technology for many decades now. I am very passionate about it and I think that it’s changing the way the world works. And I think fundamentally between the internet and social media that’s happening because there is some key ingredient that makes for economic success. Forrester calls this TERA – Trust, Efficiency, Relevance, and Access. Trust is about just being able to tap into the wisdom of the crowd so that you can talk to experts and layman and make an informed decision because you have a lot of information at your fingertips so there is a trust built into that so you are not having a biased opinion. Efficiency comes from just being able to search that and find the information very quickly. Relevance is about just finding the right information and increasingly as platforms are no more about you can actually tailor that content using bunch of fantastic apps come out around that. And then access is obviously about reach.

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