Name: Omer Ahmed Siddiqui

ID: 20162-19850

Course: TOI

Term Assignment Faculty: Sir Atiq

Video Number 1: How to make innovation and change happen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgdZfFA6v3I&t=9s
Speaker: Jeremy Gutsche
Simply put, in this video the speaker talks about how to actually bring about
innovation. The speaker discusses our resistance to change in a way that is pretty
well crafted. Furthermore, in our life we have past experiences, these experiences
play a very crucial role in your choices and we rely ourselves on these choices of
the past, more than we can actually believe, just so that we can ‘Stay on the
road’. Jeremy also says that not everyone who wants innovation to happen, is
willing to change things for the better, however, there are few individuals who
break the tide.
Extract Points:
In the corporate world it is quite hard to keep track of all the innovative stuff that
is happening in the market and what significant developments are happening; if
we miss these potential disruptions, perhaps our competitor might not. HNWI
(High Net Worth Individuals) who find success, are also met with over confidence,
which in return makes them miss astonishing opportunities; take for example the
invention of telephone, which was rejected by the Western Union because they
did not see the significance of dart thing. This also means that people usually
exaggerate the control they have. Therefore, it is pertinent for the creativity to
foster, to be receptive to fresh developments and to operate with the
presumption that you are incorrect.
Imagine you are driving a car for the first time, that too with a manual
transmission, it won’t be easy would it? Exactly the speaker’s point. However, as
time goes by and you keep driving that car to practice, your brain will build
neutral connections to help you get better at the task at hand, unless anything
diverts. It is because of this diversion that we should create teams and follow
different market trends, in order to diverge our minds from the things we know
already.
It took a lot of time for people to adapt to QWERTY Keyboard but then it became
successful, and it is hard to change something that has been quite successful.
Highly optimized keyboards have been introduced that can type a lot faster than
the traditional QWERTY Keyboard; however you and me did not switch to that
type of keyboard.
Jeremy explained that you should always attempt to have a high optionality,
meaning, if you have more options, these will lead to new options being available
in the future. Having an option to fail will eventually lead to, you trying new things
with greater freedom.
When people are comfortable somewhere, it is more likely that they will not
succeed, you need to get out of your comfort zone in order to develop disruptive
innovations.
Conclusion:
In the mentioned video, we were able to understand how innovations actually
happen; the speaker constructed his views into five important sections that are
mentioned above, in the end, we should know when we have exhausted all of our
options, not be too overconfident and should ask for opinions of other people
because two minds are better than one.

Video Number 2: Movie ‘Moneyball’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4QPVo0UIzc
Starring: Brad Pitt & Jonah Hill
This is not a rags to riches kind of movie, but a tale about disruptive innovation
and having a creative attitude that reveals a fantastic array of untapped options.
The movie is about the innovative strategy of two people to build up a baseball
team called ‘Oakland A’s’. They simply reimagined how to think about the
dynamics of creating a big league baseball club.
So, there are two guys, one is a Baseball Manager and the other one is an
Economist. These two certainly do not sound like an ideal team management for
a baseball club on paper, but you only know a thing works, when you make a
prototype.

Extract Points:
This baseball club does not even come near the term ‘Rich’, we may call it poor; in
comparison to other clubs that had a huge budget, could sign the elite names,
Oakland A was in deep trouble because of the wage crunch that they were facing,
basically they were backed up against the wall with limited resources, this was
one of the main reason why they took advantage of the situation and lined out a
completely new way of thinking innovatively.
Billy, the baseball manager makes it clear to the staff that what has been done in
the past, stays in the past, we need a completely new approach now. What Billy
proposed was to implement a statistical model to build the team from scratch.
The actual term for this model is ‘Sabermetrics’.
Quote:
‘Sabermetrics uses statistical analysis to analyze baseball records and make
determinations about player performance.’ – howstuffworks
Billy hires an economist whose thinking matches his own, meaning, this
economist named Peter thought that the game is evolving and so should the
approach of team building; what must be looked at in evaluating a performance
of a player is being neglect, in return creating poor selection or composition of the
team.
One great thing about an innovative approach is you create a lot of options and
because of those options, you have a lot of possibilities, so this is exactly what
they did, they shortlisted a handsome number of players instead of a few and
evaluated them in light of Sabermetrics. A few players would not have provided
them with the options they were looking for, so they increased the size of the
pool.
When a contract of a player ends, he becomes a free agent, meaning he is free to
leave or extend his contract with the team. When few of free agents left for
better opportunities, Billy found their replacement with creative thinking, not by
buying expensive superstars, which was never an option, but by analyzing their
base percentage, and a few low cost options presented themselves.
When you’re trying to make something magical happen, you need your team to
get behind you; you need them to synergize with you and share innovative ideas
as to how we can make it better. The experienced head coach of the club did not
agree with Billy on implementing new innovative strategy, and was acting like
barricade on the finish line, this got the poor guy fired. As his replacement Billy
found someone, who didn’t play a single game in his career, but had creative
thinking, this made it easy for him to agree with Billy, implement his strategy and
give his input.
In innovation you embrace the risk and do not back down from failures when
something doesn’t work in the first go, you need to have patience. Oakland A did
not have a very good start to the season when Billy implemented his strategy,
many of the staff started backing out of his vision for the team, but he had all the
patience in the world, because of which they tasted success.
Video Number 3: The Art of Innovation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mtjatz9r-Vc
Speaker: Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki is a venture capitalist who has also worked for some of the best
companies including Apple Co., he’s an author too.
The video we’re talking about here relates to what actually gives meaning to
innovation, how does it come to be and what is the art that creates it.
Extract Points:
I’ve narrowed down few points that best summarize what the speaker is trying to
get across, in the mentioned video.
If there are two choices in front of you, one is money and the other…. Why are we
talking about the other thing, right? This is the sad reality of the modern world,
however Guy explains in this video that, instead of going after money, you should
think how can I make a change? Obviously, if you’re extremely good at
something, you can actually change the world, however instead we question, how
can I make money?
When you run a company you should always have a Mantra, and it should feel
authentic, it should not be a sentence, the shorter the better, even two words will
do, but it should represent what you stand for.
Guy then explains that instead of going for incremental changes to make
something 5pc better, you should evolve with the market, take a leap of faith and
look for the next big thing. If you get stuck at what you are current product line is,
like Kodak, you’ll run out of gas.
When you use a smartphone made by Apple and compare it with a Chinese
Phone, you’ll know the quality, the speed, the intelligence and how complete the
IPhone feels; this is only because Apple is trying to connect with their audience
and creating something that connects with them, your product should also be the
same, the speaker explains.
If a product that has been produced by you is a game changer/extremely
innovative, but also seems incomplete, you should not stop, because new
products are not 100pc perfect, you should launch the product so there can be
feedback on how can you make the product better.
Sometimes you’re just making a product for one target audience but people from
all over start buying it, now these people will obviously have different needs than
the people you were actually making the product for, therefore you need to adapt
to the situation and tweak the product as per the customer needs.
As explained above, you design products for certain cluster of people, therefore
many people start disliking your products, but you cannot stop there because
when few start to dislike, many rise to love your product, same is the case with
Samsung’s Smartphones.
People will demotivate you in your quest to change the world with that one
innovative product, people used to laugh back in the day when an idea of an
airplane was put in front of them; This is the reason you have to hear everything,
analyze what useful thing you’ve heard from the public and then evolve or tweak
minor things in your products.
Guy also explains how to pitch your product in this video, as soon as you start
your presentation within the first 30 seconds, you have to catch the minds of the
investors, this is very crucial. You should be able to research and customize
according to the group of persons you’re pitching to, the presentation should
never be long, longer than 20 minutes is boring.

Video Number 4: The single biggest reason why start-ups succeed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpx7gpSqbY
Speaker: Bill Gross
As the name of the video suggests, Bill in this Ted Talk session explains the key
points that make a startup succeed. Throughout the history of the world, we’ve
seen many start-ups come to light, but one thing is for certain, very few of them
are still around; those which are around have been analyzed by the speaker, and
has been fit into these few points mentioned below.
Extract Points:
The first thing that the speaker points out is the Ideas that a start-up comes up
with, when you look most of the companies that have been successful and are still
standing, it is only because their ideas were better than the rest. Your idea should
not only be good, but it should also solve the problems of the people you are
trying to target; if we look at stealth aircraft for example, it is one of the most
successful invention in the world of military, why? Because countries were looking
for fighter jets that are not detected on the radars, the inventors took note of it,
their idea was simple, lets solve the problem these countries are facing.
Secondly, the speaker explains that after the idea comes the real work, and for it
you need a team that can not only make it work, but has creative thinking. If we
look at Apple they had three of the best in the business namely, Steve Jobs,
Ronald Wayne and Steve Wozniak, these are names that you google and their list
of inventions pop up, so it is clear that they had creative thinking.
Now, this one is very crucial to company’s success according to the speaker, if a
company does not know, how it will make money, then it is safe to say that they
are not sticking around for very long. To lay out a strategy for this, they will need
to have a business model.
Startups need seed money that can help them stand on their feet, therefore a
company must do all the costing and know how much money they need to raise,
in order for them to get by and grow.
In today’s era, if a company start working on an orthodox android smartphone,
they will be just another Phone Company in the market; the time does not require
for you to be an orthodox smartphone company. It is essential to a company’s
success that it starts working on the right things at the right time.
Video Number 5: Speed up innovation with Design Thinking
Speaker: Guido Stompff
https://youtu.be/ZBxZC9I6xyk
In this video the speaker talks about innovation and how it something everyone
adores, however it is quite tricky to actually know the art behind innovation.
It is quite often you see that the creative thinkers in a company do not sit well
with the financial analysts of a company, because the first one knows that
whenever he’ll bring up an innovative idea for a product in the company, the
analyst will try to bring it down by asking all the tricky questions about the cost
structure of the product, and whether it is feasible or not.
Well, how does design thinking works? You involve everyone and get their
ideas/inputs, so that the process of collective curiosity can be triggered.
Therefore, it is quite pertinent that one, before creating a product all on his own,
gets feedback from every stakeholder, end user and peers, throughout the
building process of the product. The speaker for this very reason mentions, the
organizations in the corporate world should really look into how architects or
artists do, they first draw initially get input from other, and this process goes on
and on, until the best possible result is achieved.
Everything said above is of no value if one does not START, there are many
hurdles in the way; thoughts might come in your mind to use these hurdles as an
excuse and stop, however you must not, take the first step to innovate like a
designer.
Secondly, you will have to keep your peers close, while working on this, because
nothing gets brought up in the world, by a single person’s work, there’s a team
behind it.
As many Innovation Key Note Speakers often say, many options bring with them a
lot of possibilities, therefore, instead of focusing on solutions, we must try to keep
in mind various options.
If you have followed the three steps mentioned above, you are now all set to test
out different things, and do experiments, this will also help you in your learning
process.