 I'd like to formally welcome Shilpi Kumar, our alumnus from IDC, Airee Bombay. And of course, she did some fabulous projects while she was in IDC. And I always tell people that the fabulous project she did was, she worked with the craft industry, which is the toughest. And she did a project on an onion organizer in the Indian kitchens. And from there, Shilpi is an inquisitive leader, design strategist, user experience researcher, industrial designer, and design educator with over 18 years of experience. My God, I'm getting very old now. She was my student here before founding her own consulting firm, Coge Lab. She worked with GE Transportation, Digital and Herman Miller, and where she worked closely with the operations and strategy teams to define an integrated business process for new product development and align innovation ideas to company strategy using human-centric approach. You know, that I like that a lot because humanizing technology and human-centric is the core to large companies' businesses, right? Huge monies at stake. She specializes in taking an inclusive approach with an eye on bringing together diverse perspectives from people across the organizations. This approach helps innovation and strategy teams understand the whole view of innovation, draw on existing organizational strengths and enable quick adoption of ideas. By framing the right question to users, customers, and internal stakeholders, she's able to get to the root of the problem, figure out what next to make or how to reimagine a brand. Most importantly, her expertise lies in prioritizing organizational initiatives to align with where the market is heading and what customers really need. In the most recent 10 years of a corporate experience, CLED costs customer experience in a fortune-finered company, build and grow design research capability, co-led scenario planning in 2012 for a furniture company to define how we work through 2018, consulted on various organizational restructuring and transformations, successfully led creation of complete new product development process, integrating innovation to the overall business operations and she's a researcher, insights manager, employs unique mix method research, design harmonizer, strategist, and of course capability builder because you can bring strong teams inside companies to work. In short, she'll be a phenomenal team, like organizer and team builder and can work in large teams to bring out the best in the teams to come up with various innovations and in fact, when I was in Chicago in her school, she studied at Institute of Chicago, Design Institute of Chicago, where she showed me some of the excellent work she did. Of course, it's confidential. I don't know how much she'll show you today, but what all she did for the company because the type of operations across the world are phenomenal. And when you do that type of operations, the level of integrity and empathy to the consumer and things are phenomenal. You can't forget that to do a large-scale operation. So she'll be brought in all those values into the company. She'll be, there we go. Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to us and welcome to the class at IIT Hyderabad for the entrepreneurship skills. So we're going to pull a lot of your ideas into our vision and plan for building our entrepreneurship skills in the courses. Thanks, Chagva. I also feel old with that introduction. So much work, it's needed, yeah, yeah, yeah. But thank you, I appreciate it. And I appreciate the opportunity of talking to the students. I love doing that, and it's always an honor to talk to the future leaders. So my presentation today has a little bit of my story and then a little bit more deeper about CoachLab and the premise of the company, what we do. And then I'll show you a short video, which is one of our exploratory works, which is really just researching around the world, asking people that question of what is innovation, what is not, what are some of the barriers that companies are facing today to be innovative at scale, right? You know, when I graduated from IDC, my first job was at a big manufacturing company in Mumbai. And the first project I got was actually design a single-draw unit. So I'm an industrial design graduate at IDC at an architecture degree before that. It was a one-page write-up saying, you know, we need a single-draw unit for a call center where people can come and put their personal belongings and then take it out. And this call center is pretty strict in terms of paper and because of confidentiality and all of that. That was my design brief. That was the problem I was asked to solve. And it was a big no-no to me because, you know, why on earth are we trying to design a single-draw unit? Who is it for? You know, what are they going to do? What does the overall experience look like? And at that day, this was in, I would say, 2002, I decided that I want to be the one who writes that one-page design brief. So that's kind of the premise of where my journey kind of led up to, you know, doing my second masters in the US at the IDC Chicago Design School is to really help understand what the problem is and framing the problem as a problem, not to validate, is this a good design for me? It's really about honing into what the problem is. And then as a designer, I can envision what something, you know, can be done to solve that problem. And then there's other questions that I need to test out, like, does this work or not? Or how is the overall journey for the user? So I realized quickly, but, and when I conveyed that to the company, they were very aggressive and they said, you know, this is it. You wanted to, I mean, I was an intern or, you know, junior student and I was supposed to follow the rules and do what they, and I realized that there's a big disconnect between the business operations and the innovation efforts that go in a company. And then I thought the design research and strategy is the glue between those two functions. And that's where my journey started and desired to really learn more and, you know, experience different, you know, ways of thinking about, you know, business problems that need to be solved. So I know throughout the day, you focused on the consumer and the idea and the design. And here I come with saying, oh, design is an idea, is easy to generate and create. What is difficult is how we intervene design in an organization, right? So it's the operations, you know, what happens after the design is created and after the idea is created? What happens then? So it's about building businesses that build people and, you know, who have those ideas and creating that. So just a little bit about my journey, you know, I was an architect and I had this gripe about architecture that architecture is not as human-centered as I wanted. You know, we build monuments and, you know, artifacts that are very functional. And we talk about function a lot, but it's not very empathetic with the user. And another gripe I had was there was no structure to a good problem definition. How do you really do research to define a problem without sharing my idea, right? And that is what leads to a good design brief, right? Knowing what are all the pain points of the user? How is the overall journey of the user? How does the solution you're producing fit into the overall social system, ecosystem of the person who's using? I mean, your solution is maybe 5% or 1% of their daily life. You know, how does that fit into the whole conversation? And designers had no voice, right? As a designer, you have no voice in the company. And that's what led me to do my second master's, which was actually a degree in design methods. So the whole idea was it would specialize in design research and design methods. And it's really about bringing design early way of thinking to business. So now after that, I had the ability to influence leadership. Designers were the biggest asset. And we were the voice of the customer with a strong business lens, right? So it's no more just focus on the idea and the need and the customer, but it was really thinking about balancing the business lens with the desirability lens and the technology lens, right? So, and that's what you might have commonly heard as mentioned as design thinking, right? So, you know, here I moved from an architect to an industrial designer to design for livelihood development, which Chaco Sir was mentioning. I worked with an organization called Inbar based out of China Beijing, which was really using design intervention for livelihood development. So I would go into the Himalayan range and actually work with local artisans to help their livelihood by design, you know, through design. And so there also, I was actually working like a researcher, ethnographer or anthropologist sometimes, you know, have to dress like them, be like them, try to build relationship with them to make sure that they're not feeling that I'm coming from outside and just trying to force them to do things differently. So it was interesting how that, if you think of that as an operations, it was a mega challenge operations that I had to really break into. And today, I think after many years of experience, I would call myself an advocate. I would call myself a futurist, strategist, designer, facilitator, you know, storyteller. I'm not a great designer actually. What my strength is being a facilitator or a storyteller or even a futurist in the whole gamut of things. So if you think about, I don't know if you're familiar with the squiggly line of innovation where it's like things start from very uncertain, ambiguous, you know, where you don't know what the problem is and you don't know what needs to be designed to, you know, doing all your research methods and kind of design and development and all that. And then you ultimately reach that high certainty and high confidence level. So as designers, that's what we're doing. We're trying to bring more confidence to the idea that, so we, you know, apply things like rapid prototyping and testing, right, to make sure that by the time we reach the product, we have already tested it with the consumer. So there's less a risk of failure. So in my tenure of work, I was mostly at the tail end beginning of the squiggly line. So where things are the most ambiguous, they're most uncertain and, you know, the companies don't actually know what they're going to do, what the future entails for them. So with that, I actually worked with Herman Miller first for five, six years, five years, where I was actually at the, it was a team called Insight and Exploration, which is part of the Innovation Kitchen in R&D. Herman Miller, where we were basically looking at the future of Herman Miller, you know, as Herman Miller grows, you know, what other things we need to make. So just to qualify, Herman Miller is a, is a design-led furniture manufacturer who makes office furniture, residential furniture. Some of the great designers, if you've heard about Charles and Ray Hems, were the initial creative directors over there. And I would say by legacy itself, they were very human-centered in their approach. Primarily, so I was hired actually to create a generative research capability within Herman Miller, which was trying to define the next, you know, five to 10 years of Herman Miller of where they need to invest in. As of today, Herman Miller is an, you know, it's a holding company. It's actually part of what's called Miller Knoll. They have 19 brands under their umbrella. So it's a huge conglomerate now. It's, you know, Herman Miller is just one arm within Miller Knoll bracket. So now they're beginning to retail and retail part of the furnishings industry. And then I did similar work at GE, but GE was like a contrast organization from Herman Miller. Herman Miller being a way story-led, qualitative, you know, way human-centered organization. On the other hand, GE, if you know, it's 100, at that time, it was 125 years old company had survived based on their efficient ways and innovation ways, but innovation in terms of invention, right? Like they had so many patents, they made engines and they made many things in our daily life possible, right? So I was part of their customer experience, you know, initiative leader where I was brought in to help their robust research capability as well as understand their operations and say where the disconnect is happening between the customer and the initial co-development of the products. And here we're talking about complex supply chain, transportation, railroads. So it involved going to the rail yards and, you know, talking to these operators and wearing helmets and things like it was, it was a super interesting role, but we were part of the innovation silo. And that's a common phenomenon especially when there are big companies involved. So and a lot of the research I did internal was internal, trying to figure out how we can streamline how our ideas kind of go into the organization. And that's where I got really interested in this idea of trying to find the disconnects and diagnosis almost of a co-organization, how we can make, you know, the ideas flow better in the organization. When GE was my last corporate job and I realized that it's actually nobody's job to look at things across different functions. And that's when I started this whole organization called Coach Lab, which is a global innovation consultancy. So since 2018, we have been, you know, we are a set of multicultural, multilingual women. Most consultants are women. And we partner with, you know, consultants across and even organizations to improve their business value with a human-centered approach. So think about how you can operate a business with a more human-centered lens. It's not about the idea here, right? So here I'm saying, okay, use your same kind of method of empathy and research and apply it into the organization of how you engage with stakeholders internally, right? And it is not applicable just for designers. It's all of these product managers, researchers, designers, engineers, all of these, you know, functions within the organization. We are focused on innovation performance. So it's really important for us to be, to employ lean methods within the organization so that there's not much wastage. So if you know, there's a lot of research. I mean, companies spend a lot of millions of dollars in research, but a lot of it is just sitting in the shelves and not being leveraged. Just like a lot of the ideas are sitting on the shelves and not being implemented, right? So our focus is really about, you know, performance of innovation, like how can we make the intervention of design better and much more effective. So we actually have a suit of knowledge and consulting services that help with that innovation flow within the company. So we focus a lot of value of design in business to bring clarity and focus. So that's our mission and vision. And so we do that in three ways. We look at client work. We do a lot of engagements with big corporations. Big corporations or mid-sized organizations that are trying to redefine or transform themselves to a different way of working. Or they're just trying to scale up their efforts in terms of ideating or bringing new ideas to the industry. But almost 45% of our work is client work. We do 5% pro bono work. So every year we adopt a company nonprofit or organization that is doing great social impact and we adopt that firm and help them with free services. And then we also engage in learning and building new knowledge. So we use all our client work and the pro bono work to actually learn and derive frameworks. So if you remember I mentioned my degrees in design methods. We're all about methods and frameworks to bring more structure to how we think about design and research and operations even. So we actually do a lot of work on thought leadership and it's something I'm passionate about. And we partner with design agencies and other, we recruit a lot of interns. In fact, two students at IDC also interned with us last summer and they did some great work. And I'll show you one piece as an outcome of that work, some of that work in a form of a six minute video that we created as thought leadership about what we had learned about what's not innovation and I'll share that with you. So we are basically unique in our ability to bring operational view to innovation as you know and you probably feel it. Designers don't like the operation stuff. They say, I just want to create new ideas, have fun with that. I don't want to deal with the operation stuff. So I'm kind of counter to that. I love operations. I love processes. And that's where I think is the key next opportunity for human centered design in the operations of making businesses more capable of innovating at scale. So like I mentioned earlier, the true value of design is in the intersection of people, technology and the business. So that balance is what we really work with. We have a lot of frameworks that actually help you think and take all these lenses when you're thinking about the customer journey and the solution that you're trying to produce. So we try to make sure that we work with the right stakeholders in the organization to bridge that gap. So it's really important even when you're doing a startup idea or something that's coming out in the world that you early on you're thinking about not just people and desirability but also thinking about business or how is it going to be marketed? How is it going to be sold? What does the distribution channel look like? What is the business model? Right? So now you cannot do that without balancing these three different circles. And if, I mean, now there's three more circles that you can add to it which is about inclusiveness just and what is sustainable to the environment. Right? So it's not only just, oh, is it desirable by the people? Is it viable to make it? You know, can you make it? Even does the technology exist? Or is it actually profitable for the business to make? But now you're thinking, okay, is it good for the environment? Is it good for the overall social impact on the world? Like how is it going to change behavior? Right? I don't know if you've read that book. It was a very influential book for me by Victor Papinik design the real world. And he talks about how socially responsible businesses need to be when they think about design. So we have bucketed our offerings into three big buckets. So problem framing, I think that's one of our strengths. And then insight led innovation and then institutionalizing innovation and thinking about how innovation is actually structured in the businesses. So below our list of some of the methods and things that we do to work with organizations to help them in these. In the end, we are interested in people, mindsets and values. And we do that through creative communication, storytelling, relationship management, alignment and rigor. And I would say design methods are really key to bringing alignment across the organization. So think about that you're showcasing the experience that the users have with your solution or an idea across the lens of the business, technology and the user. That's so wonderful. That's a way to align the whole team. So like I said, I'm interested in showing business leaders how ideas can flow seamlessly through the organization to all the way to their customers. So that's been my goal with my profession and career. And that's our strength as well. So I have a medium blog, which I would encourage you guys to read and follow me on LinkedIn. And just to give you an overview and a disclaimer that I have worked with a lot of large corporations. So a lot of the stories I talk about are related to the challenges of being a big company. In a smaller company or a newer company like WeWork or some of the newer companies, I think it's less challenging. It has other challenges, but these challenges are less because they're newer people and they're newer ways. They're employing newer ways of thinking and working. But in large legacy companies, there are some really old traditional ways that need to be broken down to bring this new way of thinking in it. So and we work across industries. So we don't care really, it's retail or healthcare or furniture or others we've worked in good mix of some kind of companies across the globe. So just to break the rhythm of me talking, I'm gonna share one of the exploratory knowledge thought leadership pieces with you guys. Just to give you a little premise, I interviewed a lot of people. In fact, Chakos are also I interviewed for this project. And we thought we were trying to understand what innovation is. But when we synthesized all our interviews, we realized that it's really not about what innovation is. Innovation can mean different things to different people. But what we quickly realized is what is not innovation. And that's what became the narrative is how can we bust these myths and detangle them for an organization. So imagine our organization thinking that they're being innovative, but actually that's not innovation. It's something else. And that's a big problem. It's a big challenge when you're thinking, Oh, you're being so innovative. You're doing a lot of innovation. But actually that's not innovation. That's something else. Sounds good. 70% CEOs in India want their employees to feel empowered to innovate. Yet innovation is still ranked as one of the biggest challenges today. Is it because we really aren't innovative? Is there a problem in our understanding? Why is it so? We at CogeLab said to find out what is innovation? We searched. We researched. We reached out to thought leaders, designers, academicians, growth officers, and we arrived at what is not innovation. From this research, we present seven myths of innovation that are entangling us. Myth 1 Innovation is that one bright idea. This is the most common myth. The problem is romancing the idea as a solution with little thought about its movement through the organization. It is important to synchronize the idea and manage with your stakeholders as it evolves. The idea is the seed, only 5-10% of the whole thing. Very important, but it needs to be nurtured. Lesson is, map the flow of an idea and streamline it. Myth 2 Innovation is to fight competition. Successful companies focus on genuine improvement. They don't innovate to fight competition. Coedridge understands to sustain growth. Innovation is imperative. Being innovative means evolution with times, knowledge of future needs, and customer value. The real goal is to keep looking for opportunities. Thereby, beating competition is a by-product of being consistently innovative. Myth 3 Digital transformation is innovation. Most digital transformation projects start with new technology migration, without engaging in experimentation or exploration. However, innovation is about identifying problems and finding new ways to solve them. Technology may be an enabler for solving problems, but it's not the only solution. Digital transformation is creating the illusion that you are protected. Point is, don't just migrate, explore and improve. Myth 4 Innovation is expensive. There is a common perception that only large companies have the luxury to innovate. Truth is, the majority of big innovations started cheap, quick and affordable, irrespective of the company size. Let's look at Pillpack. Within five years, they have grown into a unicorn. Not a single component of Pillpack's products and services is new to the industry. Yet, the secret is that they identified a simple human need and aligned the system to make business sense. Key is to identify what to pause and what to invest in. Myth 5 Innovation has immediate return on investment. The way our business mind thinks, we set a goal, plan, define the resources, set KPIs, and measure progress. But innovation needs small experiments and sometimes experiments fail. Key is to take returns from present and invest them in the future. The return on innovation investment may not be visible immediately. It is not a financial statement you put at the end of the year. In short, experiment, fail, reallocate, reap. Myth 6 Innovation is a one-time act. With advances in technology, any disruptions will stay relevant for a short period. Companies need to envision the future with users' relevance and perspective. All innovations have a limited era of impact. How can an organization be continuously innovating, improving, and reinventing itself? That's the holy grail. So, innovate small and repeat. Myth 7 Innovation is a natural phenomenon. Introducing focused team activities and innovation champions is essential. It cannot be a phenomenon of natural progression. Innovation is a forced activity. You need to have active players and you need to change the mindsets of the systems to make it happen. Don't just wait, orchestrate the magic. These myths lead to some significant barriers that hamper the success of large corporations in India. The Indian mindset is risk averse, which leads to a copycat culture. It romances the past and takes pride in Jagad. All of these present challenges to embracing new ways of doing business. Now, let's ask again. What is innovation? Innovation is to address a need that brings value to the world. It is systematic orchestration of mindsets and activities. It can happen at any scale, small or big, low risk or high risk, incremental or disruptive. The result is not always totally new. Put simply, not everyone needs to innovate. But with the right tools and processes, anyone can innovate. We are on a journey to explore, inform and impact the innovation landscape in India. Let's join hands. Yes, hello. Hi. Thank you for the wonderful love presentation and the video. My question was like the Jogad mindset or the copy paste mindset is very well known. Like even in the industry, like when you're working with people as well, everyone is more into that. Okay, you can just copy this template. Why are you spending the whole time in doing the research and design process? How do you get past that? And how do you show the importance of going through the whole process and innovate? I don't know. I don't know. I think it's a tough one. And I think it starts from the leadership and the mindset that they're in. And I think it's really about changing the business aspiration of where the business wants to be. If they want to be a fast follower, nobody can stop them from copying. Technology or an idea and just changing like small thing about it and launching it. But I think if the business aspiration is to be disruptive and to be the first mover, I think that has to change first. And then obviously you have methods to really come up with such ideas. So that and one of the ways is to actually redefine, reframe the problem. So if a good example is the MP3 player. Everyone, every organization was coming up with MP3 players, the Samsung and all these. And Apple could have done the same thing. But what they did is they really looked at, okay, what is the MP3 player doing? What is the problem it's solving? And they said, okay, it's about listening to the music. But it's also about enjoying and sharing music. So what they did is they reframed the problem of listening to music to enjoying and sharing music. And they created iTunes. So that was the disruption, not the iPod. And so businesses have to learn how to, first they have to desire to be disruptive or new, not necessarily always disruptive. They can just be new and unique. But then they have to know how to do that. So a capability gap is also often a problem where they want to do disruptive, but they don't know how to do it, how to approach it. So very nice. Awesome questions. I'm enjoying this. Great presentation, first of all. I wanted to know actually, how do you tackle the language barrier if that has been an issue at some point of time? And also how, the second question is, how do you decide which approach to take for analysis of interviews and the systems and workshops that you've conducted? Yeah, those are the two questions. The two big questions. So one is the language barrier. So are you talking about the literal language barrier, like five languages at the workplace? I was talking in reference to conducting interviews. Say if you're going into a language, and you're not familiar with the language, but they have to establish a language. Right. So there are two types of language barriers. One is really literally the language barrier. So we overcome that by hiring translators. So we just go with translators and do it. We just conducted a seven country study where we had Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Mexico. So we hired translators and we just did the conducted. And we made sure that the digital platforms that we were using for the ethnography, which because of COVID, we couldn't do in person. So we used a digital ethnography tool and we just chose the platform by ensuring that it does take language, different languages and stuff. So they could translate it in Japanese. And then, you know... Which approach? How do you decide which approach? Ah, that's okay. That's my master's degree, by the way. That's design methods. So but in a simplistic way, I start with the primary objective of the project that you're dwelling into. Then we look at secondary and tertiary objectives as well. And then tied to that objective, I always have research questions. So these are not the questions I'm going to ask the people. These are questions that I'm trying to learn or answer for the stakeholders. So say investing five to 10 questions or it doesn't matter how many. But then tied to each question or set of questions, I categorize the questions in terms of the method. So I always like two, three different methods for different studies because I feel like it's a combination of analytical thinking and intuition. You cannot forget, I mean, we're designers and even research has a lot of intuition and creativity in it. So I totally believe that a new method will lead you to different inspirational ideas. So that's a key. So I think it's really about what questions you're trying to learn and what's the best method to achieve answer those questions. So it's a really structured approach that we take. And it's a, I'm... Yeah, I think you can probably IDC has a whole class on it. I don't know, but it's a whole process that... But the best, simply to describe it is these three steps. You write your objective, your research questions and then say, okay, how am I going to answer this question? Maybe we do some expert interviews to learn about that or do secondary research, there's research to do that or do ethnography, follow alongs or in-home study. So it's a combination of that. Could you recommend some programs or just habits to develop to become a better qualitative interviewer? Again, that's a whole class we can talk about. But I think some simple rules are never ask a do question or a why question. Like it's avoid that because when you ask, do you do this? It's like kind of assuming and leading. When you ask why it sounds judgmental. Like why do you do this? I mean, you never ask those questions. And then also use a funnelling kind of approach where you warm up. It's almost like if you listen to radio jockies, there are them do interviews and it's an interesting way of how they build relationship, warm up the thing, get comfortable because the biggest insights come towards the end of the interview, always. It takes, even you guys, look at it. First question came after two minutes. Now you're pouring questions. You build that rapport with me. So it's about building rapport, making the interview we very comfortable with and trust. There's a trust building thing to happen. So I think the interpersonal skills are really important and being a good listener and probing at the right time is very important. So there are key methods that you use and the way we prepare for an interview and what probes we prepare and how we even set up, how we recruit and set up who we're interviewing and how we set expectations with that person is also very important. So just as a side note, like you can go on our website and the narrative section and you'll find a lot of this information, but we actually ended up creating a lot of action cards for each myth. You know, what is the kind of call to action and then what are the things you can do actually to mitigate this myth? So I mean, there are many of that. So this is our small crew. It's an ever-growing and expanding kind of a team. So there are many contractors beyond these that we leverage to do our projects and we have Studio Vitamin D actually as a design partner. So they work on our creative work. So Ashwin, he's a graduate of IDC as well and he actually and his team actually created the animation that you saw. We are on social. So please go and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We would love to grow our community and share. So we promised ourselves in last October where we started our social presence that we are going to focus on just thought leadership. So no marketing gimmick and all of that. We're just going to focus on sharing our frameworks and knowledge. So if you're interested in the things that I said today, you will get a lot of that from our social. The fabulous Shilpi is wonderful to see how your methods are very interesting. So wonderful and Shilpi, we like your name a lot. The Coach Lab. It resonates with all the Indians quite a bit. I don't know how the other people see it but it's fabulous and all the best and wonderful presentation and very good narrative. And thank you so much and all the best. And we'll catch up again. Okay, thanks so much. Bye, have a good day. Bye, enjoy.