The co-founder and CEO of Zoho Corp, Sridhar Vembu, is not one of those filthy-rich high-life lovers. It had always been in him to do something  which the masses of his motherland could benefit from. He is not new to us; We’ve had the privilege of featuring his exclusive interview. Here is more on his philanthropy; Zoho University.

This post is more about this very unorthodox software company that is rebelling against many conventions, than merely being a career guidance. It is also partly about a boy named Saran Babu who is a flagship developer at Zoho. The connection between the two stories? Saran never went to college. He went to Zoho University instead.

The success story of Saran Babu started when he was 17. And as most other success stories, this one too began with a risk. At that time, Saran was on the lookout for a part-time job so that he could take over the family burden from his retiring father. He did not have much to expect as he was just out of high school. It was that time when Zoho, formerly called AdventNet, came out with an initiative. It was to hand-pick deserving high-school students  who are on the verge of dropping-out, and train them on software development. There was no promise of being recruited because this was more of a test-drive for Zoho. It is said that 3000/- was all they initially offered to these students. After 18 months of real-time training and assessments, they would be placed as regular employees.

Saran being the very first chosen one, had a tough time taking the call between a conventional college education he could hardly afford, and trusting this then-never-heard-of company. Looking back, it might be one of the best decisions he has ever made. Five years later, Saran finds himself at the heart of Zoho Creator, a star service of Zoho, and now earns nearly 40,000/-. Never mind the money; He is adored by all for his simple ways and humble attitude; Even by those few who might envy him for his technical expertise. Saran stands tall and most of his successors turn to him for guidance. He is turning 23 next month.

Of the two sides to everything, the less-seen side need not always be the dark side. Education has always been thought of as graduation from a famous and costly college. The overlooked fact is that the other side too is changing lives. Zoho plays in a market ruled by Google and Microsoft. How could it afford to employ people who never went to high-school and college? Well, that is just what they are doing, and they are doing just fine. It is 10% already, and Sridhar would love to see around 40% of his proud followers to be graduates of Zoho University. He humbly says that it is not charity that they are doing; It is a win for the company too, because these employees are the ones with the greatest vigor and passion of a young and fresh mind. The most loyal ones too.

All this sensation comes from Zoho University which is now looking to recruit it’s 19th batch of students. Here is more on how to apply.

Kids who have completed their +2/diploma (in any stream) are eligible to apply to Zoho University at univ@zohocorp.com. They would then be given a written test, followed by a series of interviews. On successful selection, the candidates would be inducted into an 18 month training program at Zoho University.

With five full-time faculty members, a curriculum that finally has relevance to reality and 18 batches of successful high-school drop-outs, Zoho University is, without doubt, more  meaningful than conventional college education.

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GetSetGrow Editorial Team

Cheese here, is not cheese as it sounds, but a metaphor that stands for things we pursue in life. A job, a relationship, money or any material for that matter. Cheese can even be an activity which we cannot do without doing. The cheese having disappeared implies change. Change of a routine which hits us right in the face when we least expect it to.

Sniff and Scurry are mice with a smaller brains than humans. Naturally, we tend to think they are less intelligent than human beings. But in reality, smaller brain implies lesser complexity; fewer rules to follow; faster decisions. Sniff is good at “sniffing out” cheese, and Scurry excels at “scurrying” after the cheese once he knows where it is. The two mice don’t really think about things. They just react to them. They find cheese; they eat cheese. They don’t find it; they go places, looking for it. Unlike us, they don’t over-analyze and waste time doing paperback calculations. They don’t plan. They act. Spontaneously act. And most of the time, it is what works well. Sniff and Scurry are ready to handle the cheese crisis. They, without second thoughts, get back to looking for more.

Hem and Haw, you could say, are a little bit too complicated than the simple mice. They can’t help using their brains more because they have them. Hem, in particular and as the name suggests, is someone who is afraid of change; One who cannot take a break from the routine. Is this not the situation in which we find ourselves most of the time? It might even be too late before the estimation and other careful planning are done. The hesitation to move on and the lame reasons we state in defense are also brought out pretty well.

The two little people, however, mope around, blaming someone for moving their cheese. They claim they don’t deserve to be in such a situation because they worked hard through the maze to find that cheese. They are not prepared to look again for more, even though it is their only source of survival. At an instance, even after Haw came over his fear, laughed at himself for being so foolish and moved on without Hem, Hem stays stubbornly put, insisting that someone will put his cheese back. Haw, on his way, scribbles on walls for Hem to know the way, just in case he changed his mind and decided to follow him. These scribblings are the goods the author wants to deliver.To make a long story short, (I know I could have done it in the first place, but still…)

Price: $8.41 in Amazon and  Rs. 109 in India at Landmark outlets.

Spellbinder
Editorial Team
GSG

Sridhar Vembu, CEO,  Zoho Corporation.

Forbes quoted him as “Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur”. He is unorthodox: it is pretty common to be so. He is frugal: typically Indian middle class. He is both, which might be why Marc Benioff is afraid of him and Mike Moritz wants to invest in him. By turning them down, he has proved his passion to be unbound. He was quoted saying “Freedom is delicious”, and rightly said too. We are certain most of you would not have heard of Sridhar, but you will surely be influenced once you start reading, just as we did. He is, yet another successful entrepreneur in his chosen, less trodden path.

GSG Team had an exclusive interview with Sridhar Vembu, CEO, Zoho Corporation. Zoho Corp formerly AdventNet is an Indian start-up was started in 1996. It has three divisions Web NMS, ManageEngine, and Zoho.com. Zoho is the online collaborative and productivity applications suite which competes with Google Docs, Microsoft Office, Salesforce.com and a lot of biggies in the market. ManageEngine is the IT Management Software division which is trusted by IBM, Infosys, NASA, US Army and many more. Web NMS, the first product of Zoho Corp, has had its impact on networking giant CISCO, NOKIA, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola and quite some others.

GSG team had the privilege of interviewing Sridhar. He talks about his childhood, college life, his mentors, Zoho and it’s future.

1. We have not heard much about your family background and childhood days.  What was your state of mind, dream and primary goal as a student?

I was born in a small village called Umayalpuram, which is in Tanjavur district in Tamil Nadu, India. It was the custom at that time (and still the custom in most rural areas in India), I was born in the home of my maternal grandparents.  My parents were from a rural background, and had moved to Chennai a few years before I was born. I grew up in Chennai but spent every summer and many major holidays in my father’s village, so I had an early exposure to both urban and rural India.  I attended fairly modest free government-supported schools in Chennai, was educated in Tamil medium until my 10th standard, with English as the second language. Until I reached 8th standard, we used to sit on the floor, because our school could not afford benches. I still see many such schools – in fact, my guess would be that majority of Indian kids attend such schools, so it was not unusual.

The best part about my schooling was that there was no homework – I never had homework through my entire school years. There were periodic tests, and I had the habit of studying just the night before the test, which was adequate because I had fairly good memory. This meant I had a lot of free time, which was devoted to reading and sports – I was an avid reader of Tamil magazines, novels and political commentary and I played a lot of street cricket. Even at a young age, I was well informed about Indian politics. For example, I hated the state of emergency that Indira Gandhi had imposed in 1975, and I remember passionately supporting the Janata Party in 1977 which came together to unseat her, to the extent of going around my village in a bicycle to campaign for them – I was 9 years old at that time.

When I was a school kid, I used to aspire to be a scientist some day, but that was some distant goal, not something I thought about much. More than any particular life goal, I had passionate views on things I witnessed as a kid – for example, un-touch ability, which was still practiced in rural areas, and the fact that Hindu widows were treated as second-class citizens. I felt those were fundamentally unfair and unjust. I could also feel the contradiction of our textbooks teaching us that un-touchability was evil, read about Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings, yet see this evil practiced.

Around 14, I started to ask a lot of questions about poverty. I remember pestering some school teachers with “Why do they say India is a very poor country? Why are we so poor?” The standard answer would be “Population” or “Lack of natural resources” or even “We need a communist revolution” (some of my teachers really believed a revolution was coming, this was around 1982), none of which really satisfied me. I remember challenging one of my revolution-is-coming teachers with “If the revolution makes us all government servants, which is what you say would happen, wouldn’t everything be as inefficient as government offices or the telephone department or Electricity Board or the Railways? So why would such a revolution be good?” He would give a vague answer like “We would develop a new socialist consciousness” or such thing. But he enjoyed debating with me, he did encourage me to think for myself, and not accept statements made by authority, which was a good early lesson in life.

As a result of my fairly good memory as a kid, I did really well academically, so I was a favorite of my teachers. One of my middle school teachers had a significant influence, because she took a special interest in me, and pushed me to work harder. I had a mixture of fear and respect for her, and sometimes would resent her for pushing me hard,  attempted to rebel a couple of times, but too afraid to carry it out. Being a favorite of teachers is not often fun! One of my neighbors took a special interest in me, and he would tell me I should aim to get the top rank in the 10th standard state-wide public examinations. He was the one who planted that idea, and in 10th standard I worked harder than my usual level to get to that goal; in the end I got to 4th rank, which was disappointing. I remember feeling down about it for some time, but then my parents, who never had big expectations, cheered me up.

During my 11th standard, my school attracted an influx of “good” or “serious” students (because my school got a state rank in the 10th standard exams!), and one of them challenged me with “If you are so good, you should attempt the IIT entrance exams, and I bet you won’t do as well as you did in the 10th exams.” I didn’t know what IIT was at that time, but feeling challenged, I enrolled in a coaching class along with some of those “serious” students who had joined my school. That was when I discovered that my education until that date wasn’t that great, because the mathematics and physics problems were so hard. I slowly made headway, and I ended up doing well in IIT JEE, getting admitted to IIT Madras. In IIT, I was mostly an unmotivated student, cramming just the night before exams, settling for a respectable grade, without having to work too hard. One reason I was fairly unmotivated as a student was that the faculty in IIT was worse than I thought, given its billing as the best institution in India and the system simply didn’t challenge the bright students it had taken. The best things I remember about IIT were political and philosophical debates with some very smart friends, and an article I wrote in the student newspaper asking if IITs were worth funding for the government because most of the faculty were not very good, most students were not very challenged, and most anyway went abroad, so why should the government subsidize all this when there were other pressing problems in India?

After IIT, I went to Princeton University to get a PhD in Electrical Engineering, with the intention of becoming a Professor eventually. My Princeton years were fairly boring and sometimes lonely (new country, new culture), other than meeting my soon-to-be wife, which was the most enjoyable part of it! I came to Princeton with a dream of becoming a Professor, but during the course of my work, discovered that I had serious differences of opinion with the state of academic research in my area, as well as broader academia. When I was finally done with my PhD, which was highly abstract and theoretical (and increasingly out of touch with reality), I resolved to myself to seek employment as an engineer, and do something practically useful.

2. Who,  would you say, influenced you in defending your dreams and pushing your limits further?

I had many influences, starting with my middle school teacher who pushed me hard, my high school communist teacher who I vigorously debated. In IIT, I remember hitting the library to read authors like Bertrand Russel, George Orwell and Ayn Rand, none of which were part of any syllabus or official course of course, which meant it was really interesting! I spent more time with such books than any official text book in Electrical Engineering. The one benefit of all that eclectic reading was that I learned the habit of thinking clearly about a problem.

After finishing my PhD, I joined Qualcomm in 1994, which proved be a very stimulating environment. I enjoyed working with many outstanding engineers, whose talents impressed me, inspired me. and often humbled me. I felt challenged, and worked hard to learn. I stayed only 2 years in Qualcomm, but I learned more in those 2 years than I had in the previous 5 years of academia.

One of my big inspirations is Dr. Andrew Viterbi, a co-founder of Qualcomm, who has had an outstanding career as a professor, technologist, inventor and businessman.

3. What motivated you to become an Entrepreneur?

My brother Kumar joined Qualcomm as a software engineer in late 1994, because he wanted to be close to me, and because I told him Qualcomm was a great place to work. He had worked in India as a software engineer, and around 1995, we would discuss ways to do something in India.  After achieving some degree of personal prosperity – I was always frugal, so my needs were fairly modest – I remember feeling “My destiny is not to live the good life now, I have to do something in India.” It always bothered me that we are so poor in India, and by 1995, I had a good idea that business and enterprise were the key to prosperity. While I had a really good job, and enjoyed the work, this gnawing feeling about India made me take the plunge, rather than keep thinking about it.

4. What are your suggestions for students who are caught between onsite opportunity and Higher Education?

I don’t know why these two are the only choices! There are other choices too – like working in a good company, starting your own thing etc. A lot of “onsite opportunity”, unfortunately, is fairly boring outsourced work, so be careful what you aim for. On higher education, read my response to the next question!

5. Is Higher education(phd) a must to become an entrepreneur?

Absolutely not. Take the top entrepreneurs in technology: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerburg. They are very different people who built very different companies, but one thing common among them is that none of them finished college.

6. What, in your life, would you say was a failure?

I consider my PhD to be a failure, though I published the requisite papers in the requisite prestigious journals, completed the dissertation and so on. One thing I learned early on was to think clearly and face reality head on rather than deny it to myself, and once I made a somewhat belated realization that my PhD was a failure, I resolved to not stay in academia as faculty (which was the natural and expected path until then), and changed my path. I consider that to be one of the best decisions I made in my life.

7. Tell us little about Zoho Corp and the story behind the name zoho?

Zoho Corp used to be known as AdventNet, which itself had its modest start in 1996. The two most important contributors to its early success were Tony Thomas and my brother Kumar; Tony had envisioned and implemented early product ideas that made us money, and Kumar set up our engineering organization in India which is the core of the company to this day. The Zoho name was suggested by Raju Vegesna, who serves as the Zoho evangelist. He persuaded me to purchase the domain for $5000 in 2003 in spite of my initial reluctance. Little did I realize at that time that we would end up changing our name to Zoho Corporation, which we did in 2009.

8. What are your dreams and plans in the future for Zoho?

We will continue our tradition of investing heavily in engineering R&D. We hope to introduce interesting new products, to address a variety of customer needs. With the continued growth of the company, I feel fortunate that we can attempt many interesting projects, which excites the engineer in me. One thing we don’t plan on doing is to take the company public, which I believe will destroy our freedom to do interesting things.

9. When we had an opportunity to talk with one of your employee, we asked what interests him to work in Zoho Corp? He said, ” We have an excellent work culture and environment which keeps us going. I can say, with no doubt, this is one of the best places to work.” What do you say about this?

Wow, I hope we are not brainwashing that much!

Seriously, I hope we can keep it that way. That is a challenge as we grow. That is one of the challenges that I worry about. It is all too easy to become a soulless bureaucracy.

10. We also heard some of your employees say, “More than an employer-employee relationship, Sridhar is very concerned about the welfare of every individual.” Is it because you personally feel a gentle human touch can make miracles than enforcing laws? How well is it working for the organization?

What is an organization? It is a community of people who come together for a common purpose. If we don’t have that community, if we don’t have a sense of belonging, it is merely a place we go to work. In such a place, there is no soul, no spirit, no passion, and as I like to say “God has left the temple.” We have to make a profit, because without it we will not survive as an organization, unless we expect deeply immoral actions like getting bailed out by tax papers. To make an honest profit, we have to serve customers. We have a commercial motive, because I consider commerce to be one of the key enablers of culture and civilization. By figuring out and serving a customer need, we become better people.

*****

It  was a great honour for GSG Team to write about him and we would like to seize this opportunity to, not only thank him for his time, but also to wish him and his organization a great and successful journey.

And the winners are

1. AirTight Networks
2. Comviva
3. Eka Software Solutions
4. IBM Daksh Business Process Services
5. RuralShores Business Services
6. Tejas Networks
7. TringMe
8. Wipro Technologies
9. Zoho Corporation

Market Facing – Business Process and Business Model
Winner:
Eka Software Solutions

Runner up:
Comviva
Process (Internal) Innovation

Winner:
Wipro Technologies
Joint Runners up
Zoho Corporation
IBM Daksh Business Process Services Pvt Ltd

New Technology Advancement

Winner:
Tejas Networks Innovation

Joint Winner:
AirTight Networks

Start up

Winner
TringMe  – Innovation:
Runner up
RuralShores Business Services

Sarayu Srinivasan, Director, Intel Capital

The written business plan is often the first contact an entrepreneur has with the investment community. It presents the company on paper before the company can represent itself and opens the door to all subsequent interaction.

As an investor, I evaluate a lot of plans. Unfortunately, many of the plans that come across my desk are uncompelling – poorly structured, unnecessarily long, too casual, loaded with spelling and grammatical errors, encumbered by extraneous details or, conversely, too light on relevant information. The number of basic avoidable mistakes is great. You will note that the low plan quality refers not to actual content (product, service, opportunity) but more about how the information is or is not presented. Part of this syndrome can be attributed to the nascent process of venture capital fundraising in an emerging market. The fundraising cycle, consisting of creating a plan and a pitch, targeting certain investors, taking investor meetings, and so on is fairly standardized in developed markets simply because it has been practiced and perfected with a well documented, consultable history behind it. Time is a precious resource for investors and the high volume of plans and competing priorities can easily turn a difficult-to-digest plan into a passed-on plan. Deftly evaluating a plan, therefore, becomes paramount. A more detailed version of the plan can exist but for the first go round you don’t want to run the risk of losing your audience.

Ideally, a first plan should include only key components of the business with growth drivers and brakes. Seems simple enough, right? In reality, crafting a concise but readable plan can be a daunting task. What is included? What is left out or saved for subsequent discussions? Writing an effective plan is a discipline and a developed skill, usually resulting from an iterative process. The plan will likely see several incarnations where it is picked apart, rearranged, and refined before it is in a final form. Remember, this living document must summarize the details succinctly and compellingly without losing meaning and focus. No small feat; especially when it is your business and every detail seems critical to conveying the business idea.

Generally, business plans seem to come across best in a PowerPoint format, but format and sequence (assuming a logical flow) are matters of preference. In my opinion, a plan should not exceed fifteen pages; any additional data should go in to an appendix. The plan also should be able to stand alone; in other words to be read and understood without the benefit of the author’s narration.

Third, language makes a difference. Spelling, grammar, and formatting all make an impression; many investors view lack of attention to details a cardinal sin that is also indicative of a lack of respect for the reader. It raises a red flag about the entrepreneur and his or her conscientiousness now and in the future. Spell checks are built into applications for a reason – get into the habit of using them. Jargon, technical terms, and industry specific vocabulary should be regulated. If industry jargon is unavoidable, defining terms as they come up is a good practice. Explain acronyms and abbreviations the first time they appear. Do not create additional hurdles or unnecessary complexity for the reader (and ultimately for yourself).

So, from a funder’s perspective what are some of the key components that should appear in the plan? Below are items to consider including; they are by no means an exhaustive list but a base template suggestion that should help provide a general but holistic understanding of a business.

1. Conclusion: A summary page or slide stating the opportunity and the solution. A conclusion slide at the start of a plan sets expectations up front and allows the audience to focus on the details of how; there is no wondering about where the presentation is going. This is the ‘take away’ slide that captures the business on a page.

2. Product or solution: A detailed product and value proposition. Should reference differentiation, barriers to entry, and where the solution sits in its universe and may include a technology overview.

3. Market opportunity: Size, growth, macro trends, problem solved, and market share targeted.

4. Customers: Target and actual, pipeline with commitments, and segmentation.

5. Go-to-market strategy & sales: How do you reach your market? “Why to buy” message vs. competition, sales cycle, distribution, and acquisition.

6. Management or executive team: Relevant education, experience, and expertise. What is missing and what is the plan and timeline for filling the gaps?

7. Business model: Monetization strategy, scalability, sales, and costs.

8. Financials: Projections (usually for three to five years), include historical financials, if any. Use metrics like user numbers to mark growth potential.

9. Capital required, deployment plan, investors: Include milestones and current and overall growth expectations.

10 Competition: Key competition matrix. It is helpful to include competitors’ differentiators and market penetration, strengths and weaknesses, and funders and money raised.

11. Contacts: Include the name, designation, phone numbers, and email id.

The author of the article is Sarayu Srinivasan, Director, Intel Capital.Adapted from www.siliconindia.com

Update : Results Declared

The Winner
The India winner of the Young Performing Arts Entrepreneur 2009 Award is Sunil Vishnu K.

Sunil Vishnu K adjudged the India finalist for Young Performing Arts Entrepreneur 2009. He is the CEO of Evam, a house of theatre and story telling in Chennai. Started in 2003, the organisation uses various theatre techniques to help people introspect and evolve as individuals.

The award was judged by theatre and film director Suman Mukhopadhyay, Manipuri dancer Priti Patel, Professor Anjan Raichaudhuri from IIM Joka and Adam Pushkin, Head Arts and Creative Industries, British Council India and Sri Lanka.

Judges’ citation: “Sunil has great commercial clarity and a clear vision of his goals in putting the creative arts in a viable and lucrative mode. He has infectious leadership qualities and loads of positive attitude that would leave and indelible impact on the performing arts sector.”

“It is a great privilege to win this award. What I value most from this experience is that I got to meet other entrepreneurs in this field. I think there is a great need for us to work together. Thank you British Council for bringing us together,” said Vishnu, on receiving the award.

Finalists

Sunil Vishnu K: is the CEO of Evam, a house of theatre and story telling in Chennai. Started in 2003, the organisation uses various theatre techniques to help people introspect and evolve as individuals.

Vikram Iyengar: Runs Ranan Performance Collective, a dance theatre company out of Kolkata. Besides, producing and choreographing, Vikram also provides space to voices from communities to discuss the performing arts

Paramita Saha: is co-director Sapphire Creations, an experimental dance company, in Kolkata. Sapphire’s work approaches issues through South Asian sensitivity and holds international alternative arts festivals such as INTERFACE.

Pawan Kumar B.P: He runs the ACTor Productions out of Bangalore. Besides producing and hosting theatre festivals, the group also initiates forums and discussions among theatre communities

Santosh Kumar: Runs Beatscampus.com from Gurgaon promoting online music and musicians. Besides being a musician, he also helps young artists raise funds.

Sachin Kamani: Handles projects for The Company Theatre that started in 1993 in Mumbai. He is involved in fund raising, public relations and curating theatre festivals.

Jehan-Sam D Manekshaw: Founder-director of Theatre Professionals Pvt Ltd in Mumbai. The company currently focuses on capacity building in theatre sector.

Anand Mazumdar: runs a Latin dance Institute called Quickstep SALSA in Mumbai. He organises dance classes,   workshops, international exchanges, performances and festivals and performances. He also produces a wide range of instructional dance DVDs for all levels of dance.

catch details at http://www.britishcouncil.org/india-arts-ype-award.htm

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British Council has announced Young Performing Arts Entrepreneur Award for Entrepreneurs between age group 25 and 35 in following areas with minimum of 2 years professional experience

• Producers of theatre, dance, music or live art performances
• Promoters, festival directors and marketing specialists in this area
• Managers of theatre, dance, music or live art companies
• Developers of performing arts publishing, communications or websites
• Consultants providing specialist services in any of the areas outlined

Participating countries include : China, Colombia, Egypt, Georgia,Ghana, India, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

The India finalist will get an opportunity to travel to the UK (London, Glasgow and Belfast) in September 2009 on a visit programme comprising visits to designers, design-lead retailers and manufacturers, and institutions active in the procurement of design and architecture to give them an overview of the design sector in the UK. The winner will also get an award of £5,000 to develop business links with the UK

You can apply online here or visit the british council site for more details

The last date for receiving the applications is Friday, 15 May 2009.

NASSCOM Innovation Awards for the Indian IT-BPO industries is conducted every year, in which the trade-body receives a high number of applications. The top 50 innovations are selected based on a rigorous process.

The Competition was open to 4 Categories:

1. Business Innovation
2. Business Process and Business Model
3. New Technology Advancement
4. Startup

TCS’ mKrishi was chosen as one amongst the 50 IT Innovators 2008 list released by National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM). mKrishi is a mobile-based Agro Advisory system designed for farmers to receive personalized advice in their local language. Infosys developed IP Program – Innovation Management Solution ,

Click here to know more details of the innovations also download the booklet to get all the info about the Innovation made by Industries . Some of them were as below :

iKen Solutions – Mobile music portal with Artificial Intelligence techniques and methodologies
IndiaGames – Online Gaming Evangelization process
Indrion Technologies – Energy efficiency realization through integration of sensor network intelligence in work environments
Infospectrum India – 3GPP convergence product suite using the internet protocol.

“When your neighbor loses his job it is a slowdown; when you loss yours job it’s a recession; when an economist loses his job; it’s a depression.” —– said former US President Harry S Truman.

Over the last few months the global economy is a testimony to the fact of how fast the world changes. If you were greeted in early 2008 with multiple in-campus and off-campus offerings, and 30% salary hike, in 2009 you are faces with the stark reality of minimal or no offers/hikes . If your “tag cloud” in 2007-2008 had the terms “short-term incentives” ,”Employee Stock-option”, “ executive benefits, bonuses”, “perquisites” etc. in March 2009 you are greeted with regular news of lay-offs, job-cuts, deferred joining dates. We keep ourselves glued to the TV watching in utter disbelief some of the so called “Fortune 500” companies declaring themselves bankrupt, Government launching bail-out packages. While most of us are seeing the darkness of the “recession” tunnel as we travel along there are few who has already started seeing the emerging light at the end of it. So is there a light really ?

In the words of Amartya Sen, the Nobel Laureate in Economics,

“A crisis not only presents an immediate challenge that has to be faced. It also provides an opportunity to address long-term problems when people are willing to reconsider established conventions. This is why the present crisis also makes it important (for us) to face the neglected long-term issues.”

Now thinking from a student’s perspective what is the key issue? Interestingly today most of us, exhibit similar traits as though we are in Stockholm Syndrome. We show loyalty to the same system which has helped us develop so many of our vices. We are happy with our existing beliefs, ideas and are not willing to change.

In the recent EmTech India 2009 held in Delhi, Prof M. G. K. Menon, a renowned physicist and policy maker in India summarized that “India has barely touched the tip of the iceberg as a knowledge economy, and must use “disruptive technologies” to drive markets such as healthcare and education”.

The key word for survival in today’s world is “To Innovate every day”. Speaking about Innovation it’s a broad area and may sound intimidating at first. However if we closely look at any child they are the born innovator. What are the steps to innovate? It follows 3 simple steps A-B-C.

Ask Question always; don’t blindly accept things the way they are.

Believe that you can change or add value to the process. Remember everything starts with belief in you.

Change the process. You can start with a small change and see the reaction of the change; gradually you can bring about a major change.

In today’s world there are lot of Management graduates passing out every day and one of the common chapters in their curriculum is “Entrepreneurship and Innovation” (E&I).

There are various tools to help students with coming up with creative ideas , Later Thinking, Six Thinking Hats are some of them. To get an idea you have a look at the 25 Greatest Business Ideas compiled by Economic Times last month.

Example of a creative painting: Look at the picture below and identify how many ladies do you see.

Common Lateral thinking Concepts as designed by Dr Edward De Bono are:

Alternatives: Use concepts to breed new ideas

Focus: Sharpen or change your focus to improve your creative efforts

Challenge: Break free from the limits of accepted ways of operating

Random Entry: Use unconnected input to open new lines of thinking

Provocation: Move from a provocative statement to useful ideas

Harvesting: Select the best of early ideas and shape them into useable approaches

Treatment of Ideas: Develop ideas and shape them to fit an organization or situation .

A simple tool to start generating ideas is “Alternatives”.

In “Alternatives” we define the context of the situation first and then we identify the problem in that particular context and for each of the problem in that particular context we try to generate possible solutions. (Outlined in diagram of ABC triangle below).

Let us take the situation as follows: Recession Impact to students.

If we take the context as: Getting good jobs. Let’s take one of the problem and work towards generating ideas

The above was just an example of the application of “Alternative” theory to generate ideas. In similar way we can change the context and generate more and more ideas.

Before I conclude let me give you some of the innovations going on in the industry which was showcased in the EM Tech India conference.

Top 10 emerging technologies

In this year’s EmTech India conference, Technology Review listed ten technologies it thinks can change the way people live and work.

Liquid battery: A battery that can store enough electricity to allow cities to run on solar power at night.

Traveling-wave reactor: A reactor that would run on depleted uranium, making nuclear power safer and less expensive.

Paper diagnostic test: Paper that can create easy-to-use medical tests, making it possible to quickly and cheaply diagnose a range of diseases in the developing world.

Biological machines: A wirelessly controlled beetle can one day be used for surveillance or search-and-rescue missions.

US$100 genome: A nanofluidic chip that can dramatically lower the cost of genome analysis. Combined with the right sequencing technology, this chip can allow doctors to tailor medical treatment to a patient’s unique genetic profile, map new genes linked to specific diseases, and quickly identify new viruses and outbreaks.

Racetrack memory: A new type of data storage that uses magnetic nanowires. This “racetrack memory” could eventually replace all other forms of computer memory.

HashCache: A new method for storing Web content that will provide speedier Internet access, at more affordable rates around the world.

Intelligent software assistant: New software that can act as a personal aide. This virtual personal-assistant software will help users interact more effectively with Web services to complete tasks such as booking travel or finding entertainment.

Software-defined networking: A new standard called OpenFlow allows researchers to tap into Internet switches and routers, to easily test new networking technologies with the click of a mouse–all without interrupting normal service.

Nanopiezotronics: Piezoelectric nanowires can generate electricity using tiny environmental vibrations.

Happy Innovating!