Traffic woes Silicon valley

Dear Readers,
Ask what the single biggest problem in Bangalore is and most Bangaloreans would likely say it is the vehicular traffic jams, the consequent maddening time wastage and high pollution levels. What used to be a 15-minute drive, today can often take an hour or more. With the growth of vehicles at about eight per cent per annum, far outstretching population growth (at four per cent per annum), the problem of compounding private vehicles is likely to further increase in the future, unless public policies are encouraged which would change this trend.
“Let us look at the likely scenario resulting at the end of three to six months of implementation of competitive, privatised city public bus transport policy:“Corporates like TVS, Ashok Leyland, etc, alongside the present contract-carriage operators like Blueline, VRL, Sharma Transports, KPN, etc, apart from co-operatives like those formed by ex-servicemen, are likely to come on the scene with hundreds of buses, catering to all kinds and classes of demand.“The resulting competition will automatically drive the different service providers to come up with innovative schemes of attracting more and more people to switch over to the use of the buses rather than relying on their individual vehicles.“At the lower end, you will have the ‘Janata’ services, stopping at all bus stops enroute, and charging the barest minimum (which in all possibility will be much lower than BMTC’s present charges).“At the upper end, you will have the A/C deluxe services (possibly with broad, reclining seats, newspapers & magazines for reading, etc) catering to corporate executives, and operating from suburbs, say Whitefield to Residency road, with just few stops in-between. These buses may also cater to school/college students, possibly with a 25 per cent concession being offered to them.“In between, you will have a wide spectrum of services, with each service provider making known his USP through the local media.“Even within a Jayanagar or a Indiranagar, you will have mini-buses operating in given circuits, catering to the local shopping and other needs of the residents.“The usage of two-wheelers and cars will reduce drastically, at least for commuting, leading to:end-cluttering of city roads, thereby providing room for speedy movement of buses.nreduction of air pollution with lower per capita consumption of fuel.nspread of population from city centers to out-lying areas due to ready availability of cheap and efficient means of transport.npromotion of the healthy practice of walking at least to and from the bus stops.non appreciable drop in the monthly family transport budget.

Silicon Valley of India

Dear Readers,

As a location for IT outsourcing, Bangalore, India, is still the place to be. "It's far from past its prime," says Eugene Kublanov, a vice president at neoIT Inc., an offshore outsourcing consultancy in San Ramon, Calif. Bangalore still has the best concentration of IT talent in India, beautiful high-tech business parks and good weather, he says.
But the boom in offshore outsourcing is also putting strains on the infrastructure in Bangalore, which faces stiff competition from other cities in India for outsourcing business. The No. 1 complaint about Bangalore is that drivers face hours-long traffic jams on chaotic, inadequate roads. That's followed by complaints about the airport, which badly needs to be upgraded or replaced.
"The infrastructure [in Bangalore] requires a significant amount of investment, or the city won't be able to sustain its growth," Kublanov says.
A neoIT study of the best cities in India for outsourcing ranks Bangalore second, trailing the city of Gurgaon. Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai are nipping at Bangalore's heels, according to the study.
Perhaps the biggest challenge for outsourcing firms in Bangalore is the hyperinflation of IT salaries, which were up 15% in 2004..
For outsourcing firms, "it's becoming very expensive to do business in Bangalore, by India's standards," he says. "Their fees aren't going up 15%, so their margins have to give," which is why Bangalore giants such as Wipro Ltd. and Infosys Technologies Ltd. are starting to set up additional operations elsewhere.

Incremental Innovation VS Radical Innovation

Dear Readers,

It is difficult to assess who pioneered the Incremental-Radical dichotomy, partly because the concept was used by many authors, often with a different terminology but expressing the same meaning. Abernathy differentiated incremental from radical innovation already in 1978 while Porter in 1986 illustrated a similar concept called continuous and discontinuous technological changes. We also had authors defining Incremental vs. Breakthrough innovations (Tushman and Anderson) and Conservative vs. Radical innovations (Abernathy and Clark).
There are two dimensions that we can use to separate an incremental from a radical innovation:
1. The first is an internal dimension, based on the knowledge and resources involved. An incremental innovation will build upon existing knowledge and resources within a certain company, meaning it will be competence-enhancing. A radical innovation, on the other hand, will require completely new knowledge and/or resources and will be, therefore, competence-destroying.
2. The second dimension, the external one, differentiates the innovation based on the technological changes and on the impact upon the market competitiveness. An incremental innovation will involve modest technological changes and the existing products on the market will remain competitive. A radical innovation will instead involve large technological advancements, rendering the existing products non-competitive and obsolete.
Under this framework it is clear that incumbents will be in a better position if the innovation is incremental since they can use existing knowledge and resources to leverage the whole process. New entrants, on the contrary, will have a large advantage if the innovation is radical because they will not need to change their knowledge background.
Furthermore incumbents might have a hard time facing radical innovation both because they operate under a “managerial mindset” constraint and because strategically they have less of an incentive to invest in the innovation if it will cannibalize their existing products. Kodak illustrates this quite well. The company dominated the photography market over many years, and through out this extended period all the incremental innovations solidified its leadership. As soon as the market experienced a radical innovation, the entrance of the digital technology, Kodak struggled to defend its turf against the new entrants. The new technology required different knowledge, resources and mindsets.
Overall we can say that the Incremental-Radical dichotomy helped to explain some innovation patterns, and there was favorable evidence for the model within most mature industries. Over the last decades, however, the model lost some reliability as the pace of change accelerated in most sectors.There were cases where new entrants managed to displace incumbents with incremental innovations and other cases where incumbents kept their leadership exploiting a radical innovation. Consider the computer industry for instance, IBM was able to maintain its dominant position when there was a shift from vacuum tubes to integrated circuits, a radical innovation.

Fears Kill Innovation

Dear Readers,
Shortly after the death of the harsh Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, his successor Nikita Khrushchev was addressing the Supreme Soviet Council. As the new leader denounced his predecessor’s terrible crimes, a voice in the back called out: "Comrade, you were there. Why did not you stop him?"
Khrushchev looked around the hall with a look of intense disgust and yelled, "Who said that? Show your face! I want to know who said that!" No one spoke. No hand went up. After a long and uncomfortable silence, Khrushchev said, "Now you know why."

Fear exists in every organization. This includes:
Fear of challenging a dictatorial boss
Fear of confronting cherished dogmas
Fear of making mistakes
Fear of showing ignorance
The greatest fear is admitting we are fearful. Having this awareness is the start of a whole new world. All our fears narrow our perceptions, limit our potential, stifle our creativity and exhaust the energy for innovation. When we do not tell the truth, we withhold critical information that undermines the quality of decisions. If we are not willing to make mistakes, we will not be able to innovate.
Innovation thrives where everyone can "tell the truth" and not be admonished for so-called "failures." As IBM’s legendary founder Thomas Watson said upon retirement: "If I had it all to do over again, I would have encouraged employees to make more mistakes."
As leaders of innovation, we cannot eliminate fear in our organizations. But we can reduce it. We can do this by nurturing an environment where innovation can flourish; show understanding and acceptance of intelligent failure; and respond openly when ideas are challenged.
In such an open environment, innovation will boom. It takes time and commitment to empower an organization in which people feel safe. However, as we lower this fear, we will increase the speed and effectiveness of innovation and, consequently, our collective success.
Here are some tips for reducing fear levels in your organization:
Follow the law of feedback: This states there is no failure, only feedback. Successful people look at failure as an "event," an opportunity to embrace learning in the process of success.
Encourage and reward autonomy: Honor ideas that challenge accepted norms and objectives.
Support creative experiments: Encourage all brainstorming and input that serves the mission of the organization

The State of innovation in India

Dear Readers,
Barriers in innovation remain, but the most innovative companies have realized that “innovation” is not just about developing new products and services but, more fundamentally about discovering new ways to create values. To remain competitive in today’s business world, every firm must make innovation a central pillar of its strategy for growth. Let me give you a classical example:-
1) Bharti Airtel: - They established the future factory “Centre of Innovation”. Their aims to develop innovative applications specifically targeted at individual customer segment.

2) Wipro:- Wipro established an “ advisory board” and “Innovation council” to invest in and manage innovation projects.

3) Tata Motors:- Tata motors has initiated a “New production introduction process” that define business process for new products tackling everything from understanding customer requirement to commercialization and everything in between

Innovation is not just about developing new products and services . For Example :- Marico.
At Marico’s innovation is referred to “uncommon sense”. Uncommon sense is a mindset that seeks to create and unlock new value by challenging prevailing rules of the market.

Business leader drive a companies innovation culture. They must encourage the company to experiment and create options. Business Leaders should see failures as opportunities to learn and not opportunities to punish individuals and should help employees overcome or lower barriers to innovate.

High Performance Innovation framework
Innovation leadership
Innovation strategy
Innovation structure process and system
Culture
Metrices .
The top half of the framework represents the strategy element of the framework and evalutes the sophistication of the innovation strategy of a company.
The bottom half covers the hardware and linkages needed to allow ideas to move quickly and effectively.

“Innovation Platform”

Innovation platforms are powerful launching pads for new ideas, products, services and business. A platform should consist of a series of elements and a structured process that can transform ideas into values for the company. Innovation platforms should not be understood to serve only the core business. They should neither “Technology push” nor “market pull”.

Pathway for Innovation
Technological process
Product service
Logistical Channel
Occasion location branding
Insight
Production
Offering
Delivery
Customer exp.

These structure helps speed innovation from idea generation to commercialization by improving the interfaces between function for optimal resources allocation and rapid decision making.
Amit jain

DIE or SLEEP!!!!!!....?

Dear Readers,
LCCI is London chamber of commerce and India. This is one of the part of academics. The moment i heard about LCCI, i thought it is all about industry related. I thought this class will us industry exposure. But i was wrong even totaly wrong. From the very begining i still waiting this class be as crystal crazy. After attending some class i come to know that "ROAC" is very low from this class. ROAC means Return on attending classes. And i think this really needs to improve. Let me give u a classical example of one session.
Session on 13th sept'08, i rememberd when i was in the class which started from 4.30 pm. Mr Arun was taking the class. The moment when he said " Ready to recognize the English music which i am going to play" that time i come to know .............. and rest is the history.

Death is a New Invention

Dear Readers,
Death is a New Invention
From the moment we're born, we begin to die. But death is actually a fairly new invention. Death has been around, as a natural way of life, for only a small percentage of the time that life has been on our planet!
Our planet is about 4.6 billion years old. (A Billion is 1,000 million.) Life began about 3.8 billion years ago - and for most of that 3.8 billion years, living creatures were effectively immortal, and did not die. From 3.8 billion years ago, to one billion years ago, each living creature was made up of a single cell. So a single-celled creature would grow to a certain size, and then split into two, and each of those two cells would then keep on growing until they divided and so forth. These single-celled creatures would never die of old age. They might die from being run over by a rolling stone, or by being eaten by another bigger single-celled creature - but apart from that they would not die.
But about 1 billion years ago, some of the single-celled beings evolved into creatures with many different types of cells. These new creatures had some cells for thinking, other cells for moving, other cells for digestion, and so on.
And at the same time, death was born. It seems odd, but there actually are a few advantages to dying - at least, as far as the species is concerned.
Firstly, an immortal species can't adapt to any changes in the environment - only their children, with a slightly different DNA, could. Another disadvantage of immortality is that the parents and their offspring would be fighting for the same amount of food. And thirdly, the DNA of these immortal creatures would constantly be damaged by radiation from space, and chemicals in the environment, leading to more defects in the eggs carried by the mother.
Now it might sound unbelievable, but we really don't know why we age, but we do have a lot of different theories.
The first one is the environmental theory. It looks at the environment that the cells inside living creatures survive in. For example, various chemicals may gradually build up in various parts of the body, giving the cells a less pleasant environment to survive in.
And yet another theory says that we are just plain programmed to die. There's a little genetic clock inside each cell, and once it has gone through a certain number of divisions, the cell dies.
The metabolic theory of aging is like a "wear and tear" theory. It basically says that we have a limited number of days of life, and the harder we work, the sooner we use up those days.
Another theory is the error theory. It says that as we age, we get more errors in the DNA, as it divides and divides with each successive generation of cells. For example we humans have 46 chromosomes in our cells. But in human females, the percentage of cells with the wrong number of chromosomes, increases from 3% in ten-year-old women, to 13% in 70-year-old women.
A third theory is the autoimmune theory, which says that when you're born, every cell in you is immunologically identical to every other cell in your body. But as time goes by, the immunological signature of some of your cells changes, and so your body's immune system starts attacking your own cells.
Now, as we get older, our bodies change. Our eyes can't focus as well. Our skin becomes less elastic, and our bones gradually lose calcium. Our lungs can't hold as much air as they used to. As we get older, our kidneys can't concentrate our urine so well. This means, that to dump out the same amount of waste, we need to add a greater volume of water.
But recent research shows that perhaps there is one surprisingly easy way to survive to a greater age, AND in a state of good health, and I'll tell you about that in our next episode, so long as I don't fall victim to my own pre-programmed immortality.

Thinking out of the box

There's danger in thinking within the box.
Everyone who talks about creativity goes on and on about "thinking outside the box". But what does that really mean? And why is it so important?
Well, learning to think outside the box can really make a huge difference. Trust me on this. I know!
A couple years ago, I suffered through a horrible, torturous reminder about how important it is to think outside of the box.
Here's the story of a person!
It was one of his first times visiting Germany, and he understood almost no German. So, every time they went out to eat, he had to spend a ton of time poring over every single menu item with a dictionary in hand. Then he'd ask my friends to translate - and of course, forget half of the menu by the time they finished.
It always took forever.

One night, they decided to order pizzas and, rather than spend my normal 30 minutes staring at the available toppings and making my German friends translate everything twice, he decided it would just be easier to order a normal, old-fashioned Pepperoni pizza.
he should have been warned when everyone asked me, "Just pepperoni?"
But no, being a confident American who has successfully ordered pizza hundreds of times in the US, he charged blindly ahead.
"Just pepperoni!" he said with a smile (thrilled there was a type of food I could order easily in Germany.) After all, how hard could it be?
Then the pizzas arrived and boy, was I in for a surprise!
When he opened the boxes... he didn't see any pizzas that looked like mine. Of course, there was a very simple explanation for that.
In German, "pepperoni" does not refer to the style of pizza we Americans normally envision. No, in Germany, a "pepperoni" is the topping you see on the right.
Wikipedia explains the source of my confusion:
Pepperoni is frequently used as a pizza topping in American-style pizzerias. It is the most popular pizza topping in North America....Pepperoni is a corruption of peperoni, the Italian plural of peperone, referring to the bell pepper, so that ordering "peperoni" pizza in Italy is often an unwelcome surprise for North American tourists." (read it here)
Exactly. he was just a little surprised! It never occurred to me that pizza toppings were different in different countries. My thinking was so stuck inside the (pizza) box that he couldn't imagine anything else was possible.
This is exactly the sort of thinking that happens in the real world too. Most people never think beyond what they already know. If you had asked people what they wanted most in transportation options at the beginning of the 20th century, they probably would have said they wanted a faster horse.
So, while you hopefully won't ever end up in the same situation as me - picking minuscule bits of hot pepper out of your overly-spiced pizza while your "friends" roar with laughter - remember that thinking only inside the box can blind you to the possibilities that are really out there.

Be first, or be forgotten.

Dear Readers,
Be first, or be forgotten.

In the world of innovation, precision always loses out to speed.
People always remember who was first: Neil Armstrong, Secretariat (above), John Hancock.
But just try asking people who was the second person to step onto the moon, or which racehorse placed second in the 1973 Kentucky Derby, or who was the second person to sign America’s Declaration of Independence.*
It’s the same with new products and services. Being the first to market allows a company to define their niche in the minds of customers. Waiting to launch until perfection is achieved can cause a company to miss that all-important chance to be the one everyone else is evaluated against.
In some cases, the first product to go successfully to market can even create the vocabulary people use to refer to all products in that niche. People “Xerox” their documents, they blow their noses on “Kleenex” and when they need to write a short note that can be easily removed, they use a “Post-it”.
There are now many producers of copy machines, face tissues and sticky notes, but the first brands still stick in the minds of consumers. Even though they may not be perfect, the winners are almost always the ones that distinguish themselves first

Ideas from Top 2 Bottom

Dear Readers,
Ideas From Start to Finish
Everybody has ideas. Great ideas. Unfortunately, most of these ideas never materialize. There can be many different factors as to why this doesn’t happen, but ultimately one truth remains: Ideas can be hard to finish.
In this series Ideas From Start to Finish we’ll look at the factors that stop our ideas from getting completed, as well as processes and tips that move the project along. Here’s a list of the posts in the series.
Introduction
It’s OK if People Don’t Understand Your Ideas
Kick-Start the Idea by Planning
Don’t Be Afraid to Change the Dream

After clicking on this link you can find that" how ideas are precious for sides of the table"

Disposable Dustbin

Dear Readers,
I have seen in many cities the disposal of daily wastage become a problem for every household. Mostly it is kept in some dustbin in home and is being disposed off next day to the garbage bin of Municipality. Sometimes in home or near the dustbin due to some problem it is kept for one day then it gives a bad odour in the whole locality. So while disposing if it is disposed in a specially made bag of a special kind of paper bag which is will emit a good fragrance when it comes in contact with the garbage which will be such designed that the paper material will emit good odor after the inner layer of the bag decomposes after few hrs.

Oil on the Boil

Dear Readers,
India imports roughly three qtr of the country's total req. of crude oil. When American troops entered Baghdad in March 2003; world oil prices were less than $25barrel. Five years later, prices have risen more than five fold, implying a doubling of prices every year. crude oil prices touched $135/barrel. On May22 came down slightly and then rose again to nearly june9th.
There are expectations that once the recession in the US deepens and widens, price would fall.
On April'05 Maruti had talked of "Super Spike" in oil price. He had said that prices could rise to $105/barrel over the next 3yrs. The recession in the US was meant to depress oil demand and hence, prices. The demand for diseal gone up in china after the earthquake damaged regular coal based powerplants, thereby increased the demand for diseal genereted.

Motivation

Dear Readers,
Motivation is the reason or reasons for engaging in a particular behavior, especially human behavior as studied in economics psychology, neuropsychology, and philosophy. These reasons may include basic needs such as food or a desired object, hobbies, goal, state of being, or ideal. The motivation for a behavior may also be attributed to less-apparent reasons such as altruism or morality tends to be relative But there are four drivers that underline motivation

1) The drive to acquire:- We experience delight when this drive is fulfilled, discontentment when it is thwarted. The drive to acquire tends to be relative and insatiable.
2) The drive to bond:- The drive to bond when met, is associated with strong positive emotions like love and caring and when not, with negative ones like loneliness and anomie.
3) The drive to comprehend:- In the workplace, the drive to comprehend accounts for the desire to make a meaningful contribution.
4) The drive to defend:- It leads to feelings of security and confidence. It tells us a lot about people's resistance to change.