Teaching

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.

1s Upon A Time - Episode 1+1

By manav in Teaching

2017-07-19

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.

1s Upon A Time - Episode 1

By manav in Teaching

2017-07-05

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. Have fun!

Design a PROBLEM? Sounds weird right! But yes, we need to design our problem. Without designing our problem, we limit its beauty, making it insignificant and meaningless. In order to gain the true essence from a problem, we need to design it, decorate it and if possible reward it. After all a problem that is not recognized, is no problem at all!

Customer Journey Map - View Point Of A Beginner

By vivek in teaching

2017-05-24

Vivek Swaminathan is my student from the MBA Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune, India. He is my first guest blogger. Hope you enjoy the post as much as I did!

Courses I Teach Students

in Teaching

2017-04-27

“What is it that you do?” a dreaded question for people who are on their own and are pursuing multiple passion, dimensions, projects and goals. Check out these videos on why this is such a dreaded question for people like me. If you are one of those people who dread this question, may be you’ll like these videos that I have to share as part of this post.

Another one who clarifies this subject is this man - Adam Leipzig in a jovial TED talk.

TRIZ Case Studies

in Teaching

2017-04-04

The mood was tense. Will they show up or not show up? What if nobody showed up? All the advance we paid the hotel guy would go down the drain.

Prakash looked at me. He had forgotten that we were in the middle of a lovely park in Bangalore. Looked like he even forgot about the fact that I was supposed to be baby sitting my 2.5 year old.

I felt my pulse race as my mind accessed a folder called “Tense jaw dropping moments”. The folder was locked up with a password. I pried the folder open. The first few lines in my mental folder was exactly the same thing - “What if no one showed up?”

Karmic Design Thinking - Part 3 - Defining Structure

in Teaching

2016-12-22

karmic design thinking

To refresh on stuff - Rethinking Design Thinking and What is Karmic Design Thinking were things that I talked about earlier.

The broad design of this form of design thinking consists of these four stages:

I. People Orientation (or System Orientation)
This is the stage in which we acknowledge the deficiencies in the system and try and find out about what is it that people are going through. Or if it is a device or a service, our job is to figure out what is it that this system is doing.

Karmic Design Thinking - Part 2 - What is it?

in Teaching

2016-12-15

The “Aahaa” moment that design thinking is probably much older than only a few decades. That moment came to me when I traveled to an ancient set of Buddhist caves in India. These caves are located in central India and are at least 2000 years old. Ajanta caves, as they are called, were lost to humanity for about 1000 odd years before a British soldier rediscovered the caves in his hunting expedition. If you are planning on visiting Mumbai or Pune, I would highly recommend visiting these caves and spend a few days admiring these beautiful caves.

Karmic Design Thinking - Part 1 - Rethinking Design Thinking

in Teaching

2016-12-08

Let me stoke your curiosity. I have an important reason to write this series of posts on Karmic Design Thinking. Please promise that you will be patient.

Design is ubiquitous and is all around us. A tree is designed to bear the entire weight of the tree on that one single trunk. Ok, you can really say that, well, design is a conscious process. In my opinion, designs evolve naturally, either by nature or by human intervention. And since we are all part of nature, it is one and the same. Talk about talking in circles.

Are students capable of coming out with blockbuster ideas?

in Teaching

2012-05-12

The raging debate in our team has been whether students (our team picked out undergraduate engineering students in particular) are capable of generating blockbuster ideas for a thriving business/startup.
Before giving you both sides of the coin, I’ll tell you an anecdote about a large company trying to figure out what makes creative minds creative. This large company was really curious to find out the real mechanism which made the creative minds work. So, they did surveys and profiling to figure out (Education, cultural background, family details and so on) what was really happening in their minds. Zilch! They came out with no concrete patterns or reasons for the creativity in their organization.
Second round was face to face interviews to see if they were missing out something obvious. After a few interviews, they hit upon the key insight that they were looking for - creative guys thought that they were creative and the not-so-creative guys thought that they were not creative. Period! Nothing else! (As a side note, this is what neuro linguistic programming (NLP) is all about :))
With this background in mind, I go back to the original debate of whether students will come out with ideas. Sure, the students who really believe that they are creative will crack any problem given to them. The ones who think "Oh no, this is not my cup of tea to rub shoulders with the likes of Edison", will remain in the sideranks reading success stories of the creative world! I am going to build on this idea and will confidently say that the ones who believe in students, will find them to be intensively creative. While if you choose to believe that the students are not creative will find them to be unimaginative.
I choose to believe in the former and will continue to work with the young’uns to recharge my batteries :)