Hey there, thanks for reading this blog, you know what!
Reflecting about a recent trip to India, I was reminded about two encounters I have had with two different people, both academics belonging to two different traditions. Engaging them on the subject matter of innovation, I got two very interesting insights, one an engineer and a mathematician by training referred to innovation as a purposeful, single minded pursuit of a solution of a problem blighting the fulfillment of one’s goals, while the other with a sociological background referred to innovation as a systematic and methodological approach to problem solving. Now isn’t that funny, the engineer/mathematician refers to innovation in need-problem solving causality while the social scientist refers to innovation in terms of system. How come?
A few days later, in a different city in a different region of India, I was having a conversation with another academic, and the subject matter for our discussion was Indian IT companies and how they grow. The discussion turned to the topic of firms going bust, I heard the person say something rather startling, claiming that Indian IT firms do not go bust. This was indeed a remarkable claim for a student of economics, considering the notion of markets and its importance on firm behavior. But upon further reflection, I saw some wisdom in his claim. I pressed him to explain why I should take his conjecture seriously, but before he began his rebottle, I quickly realized where he was coming from and the meaning behind this conjecture. For I figured the following
Indian firms do not go bust because they are constantly looking to improvise. They improvise their business strategy, their employment strategies and their domain in which they operate. The improvising is more a consequence to survive than to make it big immediately, for they figure; I rationalized if they can survive in the Indian market for two years they have the potential to service the world market for IT services.
The challenge dear friends here is not to say that improvising is better than innovation, but to try and reflect what is going on from the two sets of different stories. True my discussions were with academics, so I was engaging with individuals whose perceptive skills are relevant to the issue. But they are not part of the real world we are trying to understand. That being a weakness it is but one among many weaknesses that academics generally suffer from, nevertheless the point here is not about their observations but how you and me understand their utterances.
Well this is how I understand it, Firms in India do improvise thus they do not go bust, this is the second story. The first story is about innovation is it systematic or step gap need based solution to a problem. To my mind, the need based solution to a problem can fall into the realm of improvising while the systematic approach to problem solving could fall into the realm of innovation. Do you agree? If not, what is your take on the two stories above and how would you interpret it? Do you see the emergence of some kind of definition here?
