Contact me at bala@balaramadurai.net.

Innovation

Attaining Innovation Nirvana through Karmic Design Thinking

Indian thinking, western philosophy - This is how a colleague of mine, Prof. Mukul Joshi, from FORE management school, New Delhi, described my treatment of design thinking (https://dt.balaramadurai.net). He invited me to give a talk to the students of FORE management school located in New Delhi about this topic. I was not sure if I would use the same phrase to describe Design Thinking. This is a philosophy, yes. This is a way of thinking, yes. But, can we attribute a certain geography to these? I wasn’t sure.

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Technology Forecasting for Strategic Decision Making - MOOC on NPTEL

Prof. Dmitry Kucharavy and I are happy to announce the launch of a new MOOC on NPTEL on Technology Forecasting for Strategic Decision Making. How to strengthen strategic decision-making with reliable technological forecasts? Numerous quantitative methods are available for predicting future demands and short-term changes. These methods, however, have limited application for such a question. The need is to combine the advantages of qualitative methods and explorative qualitative methods for long-range technological forecasting.

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GE Global invited talk on Design Thinking: The Zen Way

Dr. Srinivas Chirravuri and Gautam Goenka, are seasoned facilitators from GE Crotonville, the learning bastion of GE. In these times of online meetings and webinars, Dr. Srinivas, or Ch as he prefers to be addressed, and Gautam have thought of a series of enlightening topics. One of the topics they had chosen for such a session was Design Thinking. Ch reached out to me and from the outset, we wanted the talk to be a bit different from other webinars that I had given in the past.

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How to Be Smarter About the Innovation Trends of the World? Deadline Tomorrow

Can inventing be taught or is it in your genes? The perennial question that hounds a lot of us. G. Altshuller and his colleagues set out to prove that the art of inventing could be taught. So what’s up in the world of inventing and invention after they set out with this job? What are some of the hot trends in this field? Here is a great opportunity for you to find out.

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Bugs Bunny and His HR Problem

These students from the HR division (Team Bullseye) submitted the following story (based on a true story) as part of their course on design thinking. They used the Karmic Design Thinking methodology. I found it very entertaining and educating. Their selfie of the entire team which wrote this piece is on the way. Pigeons take time to deliver messages, you know ;) I had fun reading this. Hope you do too!

Once upon a time there lived a rabbit named Bugs Bunny. He was employed by Mr. Kangaroo who ran a carrot cultivation farm. Mr. Bugs Bunny was very hardworking and dedicated employee and always loved to give his best. One fine day when he was picking up the carrots, his assistant, Ms. Chipmunk came running to him informing him that his mother broke her back after a monkey on the tree accidently dropped a coconut on her. She was immediately hospitalized and Bugs Bunny rushed there.

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Slingshot Effect for Innovation

The fuel levels plummeted to the lowest possible level. In this near suicidal mission, Cooper lost a few members of his own team. He hadn’t aged a day while his daughter and son were older, much older than him. Physically that is. He had just been betrayed by a hero, Dr. Mann. A hero from an older mission. The betrayal had cost them parts of their mother ship, the Endurance. The cargo they carried (the human embryo stack), heated up because of the unfortunate incident with Dr. Mann. What was Cooper going to do?

It was no time for caution.

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1s Upon A Time - Episode 1+1

Manav Hada is my student from the MBA Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune, India. Manav had good fun in the class as is evident in this series of posts (Second of the series). If you didn’t notice, we had an Alfred Hitchcock/Subash Ghai moment! Manav starred in his own story as Sage Manav. Have fun!

How to design your solution?

Ok! Now you are thinking I have lost it, right? Designing the problem seemed fair, but now design the solution? Yes! Because a beautiful problem needs a beautiful solution. You don’t want the problem to be unhappy right? So let us start designing the solution.

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Gazing into the Crystal Ball using TRIZ technology trends

3 innovation facilitators - Murali Loganathan, Prakasan Kappoth and Bala Ramadurai discuss about the laws of technology evolution. http://trizindia.org/profiles/blogs/8-triz-evolution-trends-applied-to-mobile This is the link to the original blog post of the podcast. Also check out this link to the Corning Gorilla Glass story - http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/ff-corning-gorilla-glass/3/ Listen to the podcast here Image Courtesy: http://cdnimg.visualizeus.com/thumbs/40/6f/art,ball,black,and,white,crystal,light,planet-406f5e2182df35968727c56552e97dc6_h.jpg

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Custom Designed Workshop

What do budding industrial designers, a professor in industrial design, couple of material scientists and an entrepreneur have in common? A thirst for novelty and the desire to help people. The venue was perfect with movable chairs, a whiteboard, projector, an audio system, just in case, we lost our ability to shout. Ranjan had arranged for flipcharts, markers and motivators. Motivators are little chocolate blocks, which go a long way in crafting excellent design from anyone. Shankar(LinkedIn, Twitter), the lead facilitator, started off with a brief introduction on what innovation is.

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