The Innovation Diary

One of the most powerful tools in the hand of today’s innovator is Design Thinking. Gaining popularity as a method of creative problem solving, it has been used successfully in various fields to create significant innovations.   The annals of Design Thinking lore are replete with inspiring examples like how an industrial designer re-imagined MRI scanners to make them kid friendly [1] or how design thinking was used to improve patient experience at Stanford Healthcare [2].   There are many more examples just a web search away that are truly insightful and show how this approach truly keep the user right at the center of the innovation process.   Therefore, it is no wonder that the tech industry, which thrives on innovations, is the perfect domain for adopting Design Thinking in diverse areas including software development and testing.   In fact, many groups and organizations have made rapid strides in using Design Thinking to aid Software Development. So… Wh...

Lessons in life come to you from places you least expect. On the first weekend of February this year, my son, Rudraditya participated in a Taekwondo tournament, his first ever, and got a silver medal. Taekwondo is a martial art originating in Korea. It combines combat techniques, self-defense, sport, exercise, and in some cases meditation and philosophy. Pretty excited about it, he was too.  Wouldn’t take the medal off the rest of the day and would show it to everyone that we came across. I was however a little less excited than would be expected. Aditya had done remarkably well in the more difficult wooden block breaking part of the tournament and will little or no practice managed even to break a wooden block with a kick. But when it came to the comparatively easier act of demonstrating taekwondo steps, he missed a few, which cost him the gold. Finally against my better judgment I told him that he could have won gold if he had focused more. He and a friend of his ...

Would you pay for something that you can’t take home with you? Something that even when have you really don’t? Something that is intangible but is perishable, i.e. if “it” doesn’t get sold within a certain period of time, it disappears? If the question sounds funny, think again. When you fly from Chennai to Bangalore, do you carry the seat back with you home even though you paid for it, you actually bought that seat, not rented it or leased it but actually bought a seat in the plane, Still at the end of the flight the seat isn’t yours to take home. Why? Because you didn’t buy a product here, you bought a service from the Airline to transport you. Now if in the flight there were 10 empty seats would the airline be able to hoard those up and sell the next time the plane flies? No. Once the flight took off without people seating on them, the seats perished. Welcome to the crazy world of Service Industry . So why should you even be bothered to know about anything like this, you as...