 So, in today's class, we will talk about the concerns for innovation. I've been working for the last 20 years in this field, trying to work and see how innovation happens across various domains. I was also in L and T earlier where we could see in industry, innovation happens because of a number of people in the organization. IIT Bombay is both a center of excellence in its core activities of teaching and research, as well as a key contributor to high-end knowledge as well as manufacturing services. So, when I moved to IIT, I also realized that professors have a lot of research content. Some of them are able to take it to the innovation and others are not. So, then I had to also work on our own projects in IDC to see why some projects go to the market. One of the most common products in the market of our professors is the voting machine. The major problem was that we have to make it a product which is simple to operate because it was earlier a steel box in which people used to just put votes. Now it's an electronic voting machine. Now, we wanted to remove the fear of the machine first. So, it was made into a simple, operative box which is as simple as TV. So, this was our major achievement, what we have achieved. So, in that process, we redefined the security in terms of not just steel and all that, but in terms of visibility where we lock each part and where we seal each part in front of everybody. And I think one of the big reasons it has took the test of time till now, it works even now perfectly well, is because of this people can, you know, slowly have been able to trust the system. And of course, it gave all the advantage of having an electronic system like it's same time. Elections can be declared in a GFI at the same time. Yeah, it doesn't take time to do that. And I must tell you, I was a student at that time, 1988. And I was watching Professor Rao and Prasad Ravi Puvaya working on these machines and I would see them, you know, shaping them using plaster mock-up models before they could go for the meeting with BEL to take this to the level of implementation. So, there's something which is very, very critical in innovation. And what are these critical aspects in innovation is when I, you know, conceived my book, the design of the post box for India Post, is I came up with the concerns of innovation. I call them the Chakus-7 concerns of innovation. And these concerns are very critical in the innovation journey. And it doesn't necessarily belong to only the designer. It could be a professor who wants to go to innovation. It could be an entrepreneur who's doing innovation. It could be an NGO who's working on innovation. But the concerns are there and then only innovation can happen. So, let us see the first concern. The first concern is the cause. The cause is like an activist that you're standing saying that I'm going to solve this problem. So, sure, you're really, really standing and saying that I'm going to solve this problem and see to it that all the users get the benefit out of it. If I'm just saying I'm solving the problem, I'm not going to the market, right? So, here, the designer is taking this cause saying that I'm going to see to it that is going to implement it. And that's what is the most important aspect in my case or in the case of the professors you saw, Prof. Ravi, Dr. Manish Agarwal and NFTDC, Dr. Balasubramaniam, who decided to take the processes, the mega process to the people at an affordable cost so that children and people suffering from cancer do not lose their leg if they get a bone cancer. So, the cause becomes the very critical aspect of the total journey to begin with. And then the interesting aspect is that the context is as important as the cause. But as we don't understand our context, our context in our country for helmets is our country is a tropical, very hot country. I can't use helmets coming from England. I can't use helmets designed for motorcycle racing. Today, in our country, two-wheeler riding motorcycle is necessity going to office, right? It is no longer a evening ride or a passion ride or a trekking ride. Like 90% of abroad in Europe, it is meant for that purpose. Very hardly it is meant for the commuting purpose and the necessity. So here, our contexts are very different from anybody else's context. The context for any innovation becomes very, very critical and addressing the context and the environment becomes the next important concern in innovation. And after you understand the context and you stand for the cause, you'll notice that a number of times we lose out on the insights. You will gain insights only when you are completely involved with the scenario and with the users. So all your issues of user studies, all your issues of ergonomics, all your issues of understanding similar products, all your issues of understanding what's happening today in the market, why people are not using or they're using, what are the current problems with the products, everything becomes a comprehension. And when you draw insights from this comprehension, you get the whole list what is critical. So without those insights, you just can't go ahead in your project. So that becomes a very important stage where you build insights, where you document studies of insights, you do videography of users, you do photo documentation of user problems and user situations and come up with the complete list and then build something called the direction, which is the check. The check is to have the complete list and you want to stick to all the list and all your ideas and development should happen with that check. So we'll come and then it's nothing but a product brief and you know, you're actually making everything happen because you should know the direction you're going. Very early in your phase because your insights are there, your contextual information is there, your comprehension is very, very clear. You need to create a clear direction of how your design should go. And then of course the very, very creative aspect of idea generation and creating concepts. So generating ideas, are ideas concepts? What is the difference between ideas and concepts? Address a particular problem in a product or in a service. Whereas a concept addresses all issues of the, so a number of ideas will form a concept. That's very, very critical in conception. So you develop the ideas, you develop the concepts and you develop your final, you know, concept, which will match the check. Now that's what we call it a check. We take the check and whichever concept matches the check the most will be the concept that you will be selected for your next stage of deployment, which is the crafting, which is a 6C. So here what are you doing? You're quickly building mockups, three dimensional mockups. You're quickly building like prototypes because you can do some user study with mockups. You can do some user study with prototypes and you can of course do a lot of work when you're multiple pilot production. And then comes the connection where you go back to the user and connect with him and check whether all the aspects you started with are matching or not and maximum number of, you know, you know, users are benefited. So that's the connection happened. So this is synthesized from my industry experience, from my student project experience and from my live experience in the studio and watching other professors all across IIT. So this is the innovation journey. A number of times you repeat these processes. For example, if you go to the users at the concept stage and the prototype stage, you fail there, you go back to your comprehension context and check and come back again with ideas and do. So this whole thing is a cyclic, you know, till your innovation happens. So the cost is to the concern to solve a problem. The context is to understand the user and the scenario. The comprehension is arriving at the design insights. The check is the blueprint of design. Remember, we talked about it. A clear plan of action. And then the conception is creating multiple ideas and combining them into concepts. And the crafting is making mock-ups, functional prototypes and pilot production. Because pilot production also is a crafting because you're spending a lot of time and effort. And then you have the connection where your mass production and you reach a large number of users and you connected back with the user and the benefit has reached the people at large where you're saying that you got the benefit address to the people. So let us put this on a very interesting platform. After I finished my PhD and I came to IIT Bombay, I saw this rusted post box just next to IDC. It was rusted and after some time even the door fell down. And I said, you know, we all, you know, sitting in such great institutes, the best professors in materials, manufacturing and management is available here. So why can't we change one product in the country? So my cause was, I'll start this journey and not stop till I have large-scale deployment and you know, see to it that I, you know, solve this problem. Because it's like, you know, very unfortunate that water gets in, the letters get soggy. But I myself watched some letters being very, you know, sort of wet in this box, which was, you know, next to IDC under a tree. So that was the first thing, the cause. And then luckily I got a student who said, you know, he went with my cause. He said, I'll work with you. And it was a student project and we started our journey of understanding the context. And we found out that the context is very different what we thought. But then we found out thousands of issues about these boxes. They were difficult to open during the rainy season. The postman could not hold his umbrella when he was taking out the letters. And then the box would be wet. So the letters would be wet. The children can't reach the letter box because its height is very high. So multiple issues. And then we also checked, in understanding the context, we have to check the management principles of India Post. So we went to GPO to check what are they based on. And then we found out that the lowest division clerk is the one who works on these post boxes. They order post boxes on a tender system where the rates are old, 20-year-old rates they give for making the boxes. So what would people do? How will they manufacture these boxes with 20-year-old rates? Of course, you recycle material. They'll use old, you know, which is already rusted. So what happens if you use rusted, already rusted steel and paint it? Will the rusting stop? Paint gets up after some time. Paint gets gone because the rusting will start progressing a little bit. The paint will chip off and further rusting will happen. Now we have an innovation journey, right? I'm just not making a fancy looking nice post box and I'm saying my job is done. Here I'm saying that I'm going to look at the total context of what is happening in this scenario so that I can make an impact and change all this. So I have to involve the management of India Post also in this. Who is the head of the India Post organization? It's a government organization, right? It's a ministry. Ministry of Post, right? Who would be the head of the Ministry of Post? Minister. Well, your minister was the head, right? Minister calls the shots. After the minister, who is there in the ministry? The secretary, the IS officers, right? The highest level is the secretary and then comes the member secretaries and then comes the postmaster generals or the chief postmaster general and then the postmaster generals. So where we did reach first, where my student reached the postmaster general in GPO. He reached somewhere on fourth level already. Till I don't reach the top level, you know what's going to happen? Implementation will not happen and you need to understand the problems of all the levels. Otherwise things won't happen. The context become very important and then we understood the insights very closely and all the things I was mentioning was also the insights and the context together. So here we came up with a very, you know, even the postman does a lot of interesting, you know, he puts plastic inside so that his letters are not wet and they are flat tops in some of the boxes. This is a rocket science, the flat top will always rust, right? Water will stay over there and rust more and, you know, we built a lot of insights in this and that's called the comprehension and came the brief. The brief is very clear. What is the cause I stood for? Maintenance fee postbox, right? It's not rust. Why did I start the whole journey? I should not forget that. Generally people forget and I am no exception. So you will see how we failed little later. Okay? So we said maintenance fee for 20 years, that is a checklist. Use of contemporary materials. Standard phenomena of innovation, use current materials, don't use dated materials. Postmanufacturing. Because I knew these boxes have to be really strong, right? Because they are in the field there. These are robust manufacturing. It should be user-convenient. People should be able to easily post because we are not comprehension. We realize that children are not able to post, then it's too hot all, sometimes people on pedestals. So we said this modular design, they should be a small and large box because the volumes are changing. So we need, you know, two designs and create identity for India post that came last. Generally all my design assignments creating aesthetics identity become number one, right? Now I'm on innovation journey. So design and aesthetics, you know, came last, but to my surprise, when I offered this brief to the postmaster general along with the student, they said we are a growing organization. We are also, we bought a jet now for transporting of our letters. They bought a jet. They have a jet now. You know, private India post jet and we want to have a new identity. So he himself asked for a new identity for the post box. And then we said, yes, we'll work on that, but our checklist is very clear, the direction is happening from wherever it is happening. So here we have the fifth, see the conception. So we've generated a lot of ideas. You'll see online more details. So a lot of ideas were developed, then three concepts were built, right? And by applying the check, the first concept was the most close to the requirement list. From all aspects of the, you know, like maintenance free aspects, the manufacturing aspects and the aspects of easy installation and multiple aspects, the first one was the best. And then went into crafting where a prototype was built by hand and then using CNC machines, a small pilot of five were built and then a large pilot production of 20 were built and they were put in all put all over the country in five different places, Delhi, Bombay, Patna and Chennai and very, very happy feedback. The peoples were having articles saying past imperfect, future good, you know, multiple things like that they were saying, you know, and then they were saying, you know, new box changing the whole, you know, landscape of India post. And then the India post celebrated their 150 years celebration and they launched the box during that celebration. This is the first prototype they launched. So there we just reached the stage of, this was the pilot stage, right? We reached the pilot stage of production and they launched the box. And then interestingly happened, suddenly we found a lot of money in IIT's bank and they said, we give you this money, now manufacture 200 number and give it to us. And I told them, I'm no manufacturer. I'm a professor in IIT, I can go to the pilot, they said, no, no, we can't help it. We need this badly now that the ministers, what are these guys sitting over there? The secretary of India. So we have reached the highest authority now. So the secretary inaugurated it. So now they want 200 numbers and then our journey started. We manufactured 200 numbers by collaborating with five different industries. We collaborate Jindal manufacture, Jindal stainless steel for the stainless steel. Jindal architecture for the architecture, you know, the manufacturing and the prototyping. Locks, whom did we go to? God rage, very good. God rage locks. We had to God rage, God should not rest, right? In the non-rusting locks. For bolts, we went to Hilti. The bolts, because we have a new design, which is bolted to the floor. Earlier design was, you know, rusted, it would go into the floor. So we wanted bolted design into Hilti. So we went to, and then for the plastic top, we went to the best manufacturer at that time called GE Plastics and used G-Loy, which is a combination of polycarbonate and ABS, very, very good material for the tops and we manufactured 200 number. OK, so this is made out of G-Loy, very, very good opening, very easy to post letters, height is also perfect, a lot of space for advertising on the side. So you can make revenue out of advertising, stainless steel box, scratch-brite finish. We also insisted on scratch-brite so that no light, if you have a headlamp, it should shine back in the cars. So, you know, that was given in and then we had a nice change of timing schedule and the location addresses and all done well. And then, you know, I'd like to now take you to a new journey to show you what exactly happened after this. So let me now take you to the pitfalls of innovation. We've done so many cases, right, on design technology innovation. So where all do we have the pitfalls? Let us start with the first pitfall. A lot of my professors in IIT, we've got around 500 professors, do research. When you do research, you need to write a research paper. Research paper is the outcome and the research paper is published in research journals which are very noted and the IIT professors are given promotion if they have so many research papers in so many journals. And the journals are also rated. I can't put in Tom Dick and Harry Journal. I had to put only in the journal which is reputed. So what a reputed journal will have another 10 professors on the panel will not accept the paper till it has got quality research. So that is the whole yardstick on which we survive in IIT Bombay. So that is the whole level of research. So what happens when some new material for chair was developed? I developed a new plastic for manufacturing chairs or a new metal for manufacturing chairs. I made a research paper and I didn't use it. So it's got in the pitfall. If I leap from the pitfall, what happens in the second stage comes the design. So what have we done in the design stage? You made the mock-up of the chair, see small size. Use that new material which is very thin and very like lightweight and low cost, no not trusting, whatever research you did, you use all that research to make a chair. And then if you have not taken it anywhere else, which is most of our 99% of the projects in IDC are in this pitfall. So if you take this pitfall, look at the pole vault, you need to do a pole vault. Pole vault is a skilled base. So you need a lot of practice, a lot of skills, a lot of knowledge to take any mock-up to a prototype stage, to leapfrog this. So now, and for taking the prototype stage, I need a lot of support structure. I have special people who do welding. I have special people who do fabrics teaching for the cloth and special fabrics. I may have people who are doing fixtures for building the product and I just build one prototype. What is the cost of a prototype when compared to the final product? Any guess? 100 times, very good, 50 to 100 times easily or 20 to 100 times. Because you're going to make you one and you're putting a lot of effort because it was not existing. And I'm getting that material from the research. What happens when I get material from the research? Tell me. No manufacturer is manufacturing. So I do all the production using a plant and a rolling mill to produce that pipe. Now we come to the working prototype. So what happens when you have a working prototype? You can test it, right? You can get a lot of users to sit on it, check whether it is good, not good, all the things. And then you take to a pilot production. And here you're flying on a balloon. And you have a lot of support structures from various departments. Like you can talk to market research people. You can talk to manufacturing experts in tooling. You can talk to people who are experts in pipe bending for the chair. So multiple things are there and you then leap off to pilot production. And in the pilot production, you can look at, see, how now it has become a special purpose fixtures to now make the pilot of 20 or 200 number. And what is the cost of pilot production? 20 times to 50 times. If that is 50 to 100, this will be 20 to 50 times. So pilot is expensive because you're not producing too many and you have a lot of skilled people working on that. And then comes the next stage from pilot production to the mass production. And this is the most difficult stage. Lot of people fail over here. Most of the IITs startups are all stuck over here. From startup, they need a prototype. From prototype, they can somehow garner the money to do the pilot. And after the pilot is the biggest leap, where you need to reach large scale to make innovation happen. And for that large scale, you need tremendous onion and aeroplane to fly. See, here it is much more difficult, much more expensive. So you have specialists in manufacturing, specialists in tool makings, specialists in understanding user needs and aspirates. Looking for a large number of users. Large number of users, you need to have social research, social economic structures coming into picture. Whether this product will run or not, they will do a lot of benchmarking. They'll go and do user studies in locations and market research in locations to come and say, oh, you can invest this 100 crores in this business. I think it's a good product. And then only it can go to mass production because mass production leads a lot of tooling. And then you have multiple pieces assembled and you take it for production. So this is the whole journey which I wanted to show you. So in this stage, when we did 200 numbers and it went to all, first 20 went to where? The metros. All educated people, big journalists were happy. And when the 200 were made, the pilot was made, it went to all the areas which required post boxes and most of them were rural areas. And what happened with the boxes? Nobody recognized the boxes. They thought it was garbage bins. We said red color atop is enough. It was not enough. They wanted a rusted box but red color. They wanted a rusted box but round top. So what was the most important thing? User perception of product. Because this is a legacy product. This product was there for ages, right? So we fell flat on our face. We failed. We fell into the ditch again, that pilot ditch. And we had to go back to our drawing boards, make the sketches again. Then now we had a new brief. Marry the old and the new. There's an old form. My form can't be novel and completely out of the box. It has to be coming out of the old form so that people can recognize it. And then came this round top and red color. And then they said, yeah, this is recognizable. And then we did an actual user testing to find out whether people will access it as a box. And they said, yes. So here we have, and now by this time, the project moved to IIT Bombay. We had the design innovation center. So that's the secretary of MHRD now. My secretary pose already retired. New secretary came in and he was very unhappy. When you fail, unfortunately, ministries don't know that failure is good for design or failure is good for innovation. Because once you fail, you do better, right? They would not let me stand in front of them. They would say, how did you do this? How can you fail? I said, I'm also a human being and I'm a professor in IIT. So I got so much critique at the ministry that I had to keep quite for a couple of months and then start working on it again. And here we have the, you know, so now the project is from the secretary minister of human resource, the innovation, the design innovation center is from the, it's a project of MHRD. So we took it under that, we developed the prototypes and we now are in the race. And then we showed it to the prime minister, saying that this is the box which is going to work. He was in IIT for the convocation a year back and then we showed the box to him and he liked the box. So now we are back in the India post with the new secretary asking him to take it to market. So the cause remains, right? We thought we nearly succeeded, right? So that's the interesting journey of innovation that till you don't do user testing, you can again follow the pitfall of the innovation cycle and things will not move. So that was the whole journey of the pitfalls in innovation and the seven concerns of innovation. So if you look at the seven concerns, it happens in all the aspects. Here also when the concern is there, you will be able to leap from the pitfalls. If the concern is not there, it dies. And the concern can be from various quarters. It could be from the ministry's concern, it could be the concern of the funding agencies. Here for example, in the case of the processes, the funding agencies were also concerned that the product should go to the people. So how did you prevent trusting? We used stainless steel and we powder coated it. We had to, see it looked foolish, right? Stainless steel. That's why we didn't paint it. We said stainless steel is a good material. It shines, it looks modern. Because remember, even the, you know, who will mislead you the most? The clients. They wanted new identity also. They said we should look new. We should have stainless new identity. Yeah. Is there something on the inside of box as well, which helps take out the letters easily? In fact, that's a very interesting, you know, point that point actually came from the users. They actually said why don't you tie a bag inside? The users gave the suggestion, the first meeting itself, the postmaster generals across Maharashtra came. So they just grabbed the bag and they take it. So that suggestion was theirs, it's not ours. This is wonderful. So we put a bag inside with four hooks and you know, the letters fall directly in the bag and they just grab the bag, put a new bag and go away. And the bag was also recyclable. So it doesn't, you know, affect us in any way. What was the reaction when they saw the red box like the post office people? In fact, you know, I must tell you, you know, that after we failed once, they were not ready to accept anything other than round. And as new manufacturing techniques developed, round was earlier the manufacturing technique to make everything. They were using rolling processes. Today, everything you see are our boxes, washing machines, the cupboards and all. So we use folding process, which is much more cost effective in manufacturing and save a lot of material. And then it also, you know, helps us put more volume of letters inside in a smaller volume, round takes less volume of letters. So, you know, like after showing the red one, you know, because of the older reaction, they were not very keen in taking it forward. Even after making it red, even giving it around top. So I had to go to the prime minister to make him like it, hoping that, you know, they would, they would, you know, they would go forward because the first box which was designed was designed by my professor, Professor Atwankar. And at that time, the box was put opposite Indira Gandhi's house, the prime minister's house. And she liked the box and that went into production. In what stage are you, you know, in the sense, like, are you still taking this forward? Yeah, we're still taking forward. We're still like, you know, again, requesting them, please give us the pilot order. And if they give us a pilot order, then we'll put a pilot. Then we'll again go for mass production, which is much, much larger. This time, the pilot itself will be 200. And then the mass production will be maybe 20,000. Because we need around 5,000,000 post boxes in the country. And in the meanwhile, what's happening is, technology is going forward. You need more, you know, more things in the box, maybe. So we still don't know how things will move. But, you know, but this is a landmark product for them. This is a, you know, totem pole on the wall.