Nano by India Tata is an Indigenous Innovation from an Emerging Market 203.0
The Nano is not just a disruptive innovation but a truly indigenous one. The most fascinating person I met at 7th Asialics in Taipei is Professor Chaisung Lim of the Miller School of Management of Techology, Konkuk University, Korea. We had a long discussion over breakfast on innovation from emerging markets (or as the jargon [...]
Positive Deviance Finds and Enacts Change from the Ground Up 195.0
Pascale and Sternin develop the innovation of Positive Deviance All my professional life, as an Industrial Engineer or IE, I have been involved in change management. Typically for an IE, change starts from the mantra “there is always a better way.” Next, it leads to packaging of the change and, finally, to persuading the stakeholders [...]
Implementing Automated Elections in a Context of Cheating and Mistrust 181.0
Difficult hurdles for tech-enabled social innovation in the Philippines Still, the benefits in making wholesale cheating difficult – the main purpose for automating counting and canvassing in this election – and getting the results quicker for the national officials may be well worth the hard work. For me, the most emblematic story on the management [...]
A Different Take on Innovation from Adjacency 128.0
Tiny Tatua dives deep into milk to regularly deliver large payouts Tatua Cooperative Dairy Co Ltd of New Zealand shows another approach to adjacency. Instead of moving to an adjacent application (like BYD), Tatua dives deep into milk fractions and derives a more valuable mix of products to consistently return better payouts to its cooperative [...]
Support our Innovative Entrepreneurs 123.0
Filipino companies and entrepreneurs hardly do any basic science-based research. All the while, I have thought this to be only because of the high cost and uncertainty of doing such research. I have come to realize that they know it is less risky (and more rewarding) to take opportunities from inefficiencies in the local economy [...]
Paul Romer and the S-Curve of Innovation 94.0
Theoretical economists and management theorists, like scientists viz engineers, often do not see eye-to-eye. The goal of the first is often new knowledge while those of the second is practical application. Their stakeholders, methodologies and measures of success are also different. Still, they often inhabit one S-curve though at different parts. For this post, the [...]
Domestic Scan-Adapt-Diffuse Yields Laing for the World – 3 of 3
Delivering laing to Filipinos, in cans or in pouches, all over the world and all through the year is a difficult challenge to Scan-Adapt-and-Diffuse (from Post 68) for new combinations of otherwise mature technologies. In an ideal world, food factories would like to get the exact quantity of raw materials for processing every working day [...]
Appropriate Technology from Scan-Adapt-Diffuse – 1 of 3
Innovation through Scan-Adapt-Diffuse is appropriate for emerging markets “Making Filipinos wealthier and the country stronger” has been my mantra in this blog. Being an industrial engineer with a passion for economics, I do not present this statement in terms of aggregates – like a typical economist – but in specific and practical terms. Update on [...]
QFD and Process Innovation for SYNTHESiST 16.0
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.“ This is the first sentence from Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” The first page of the book has 249 words. Just 54 have more than one syllable. [...]
