Lower rate of innovation

Innovation Slump, Low Innovation Rate, Dew Drops, Ravichander Rao

Why is the level of innovation low though the potential of human mind is immense? Innovation has been mantra for a while and more so in this recession. The company that innovates would survive and gain leadership, and the ones that do not will sink. Paraphrasing the legendary Peter Drucker, innovation should lead to either improvement in the customer experience or should give product a competitive edge (enhancements) or drive the cost of ownership down. Clearly, innovation allows a company to add significant value to their product line. Yet, the rate of innovation is low, despite the fact that company would promote all efforts to drive innovation!

There are at least two reasons for this - creativity challenged and problem of like mindedness. Creativity is an innate ability. Some amount of training can make you an artist, but training cannot make you creative. Creativity develops through a lot of observation and deliberation. The problem of an artist (which most of us are) is that he gets shackled by paradigms which enabled him to be an artist. The sequential thought process of analysing problems creates paradigm traps, which he is unable to break. Whereas a creative person does not fall in to paradigm traps. He challenges the existing paradigms and is able to search for the alternatives or may be he is able to jump from one paradigm to another to search for alternatives. But the people with this ability are very few. The second problem of like mindedness is that the organizations today are homogeneous. A technology company will be full of engineers, an ad agency will be full of artists and so on. Within each organization of a company the degree of homogeneity is even higher. A part of the reason is, within an organization the educational background and training of the employees is uniform. If all employees are alike, there is no diversity of ideas. If you ask 10 employees on how to solve the problem, you won't get 10 different answers, but 1 answer or at the maximum 2 different answers. In such situation, even though there is an intent to innovate, there is no great scope for innovation.

Any other reasons?

Pairing bluetooth handsfree with a laptop

Bluetooth Pairing, Dew Drops, Ravichander Rao

Finally, I can use the bluetooth handsfree with my laptop! Oh, what an amazing feeling this is (the feeling of carrying one less device and set of wires is an amazing feeling for a road warrior)! This sense of victory is making me really happy. I pored over the internet for the past 3 days and spent about 4 hrs to read articles that explained how to do this. But none of them were clear cut, so I was pretty much left alone. So, having discovered how to do this, I want to share with the rest of the people so they can also feel liberated.

First of all double click on the bluetooth device icon to setup the new connection. Once a window pops-up, set the new connection through the wizard or any other options that is available. When the bluetooth in your laptop is starting to search for the available bluetooth devices, boot or start your handsfree device and hold the button ON-OFF button till the laptop detects the presence. If your handsfree was already ON, the laptop sometimes does not detect the handsfree. None of the articles that I looked at, talked about this aspect. Once the bluetooth device shows up on the laptop as an available connection, select it. Choose the headset or handsfree option to pair your laptop to handsfree. Now you can use your handsfree device for voice chats or listening to the music.

What makes the difference?

Attitude, Dew Drops, Ravichander Rao

I am still struggling to come up with an apt title for what I am going to write now. Perhaps I am trying to combine two different themes into one, that's why? So far I have already come up with three - 1) It is "I" who makes the difference 2) Sometimes "it" is just near you 3) What makes the difference? and none of them seem to convey what I want to write about. Each of them conveys some of what I want to write but not everything. Nonetheless, I will settle for the 3rd one and keep on going without worrying about what the title should be.

I have been doing a lot of traveling for a little over four years now for various business related projects. During the first couple of years, traveling was exciting because I could see different countries, meet different people, see different cultures, appreciate similarities and differences between the cultures, sample good local food and many such things. But within two years, it was no longer exciting to me! The new places started looking similar and the attraction was lost. The Seattle downtown looks similar to Mumbai or Shanghai city center - tall buildings near a beach or a river on a bright afternoon.

(Downtown Seattle, WA)

The Pike place market looks like any other crowded market in India.

(Pike Place Market, Seattle, WA)

So why lug 30 pound bags, take a 20 hour cramped flight to another country, miss my cup of dal, curd and rice, and take all the pains just to see another similar place? Ahh, what a miserable position to be in, if your job involves a lot of travel!

Luckily for me, my perception changed for good this summer. I drove about 3 hours reach to Seattle from Portland to see Pike place, which is famous for its energetic people. On reaching the Pike place, I felt nothing exciting about the place, till I saw this grandmother and her grand-daughter.

(I do not have your permission to post this photo, but you guys are simply great! I want others to share your attitude too. I did not want to post your picture, but this article is incomplete without this picture! )

Everyone other than the grandmother and grand-daughter seem to be indifferent at one of the most active areas of Seattle. The grandmother is enjoying the moment (In fact, she asked me to take her picture and even posed like a model before bursting into laughter!) and her infectious laughter spread to the kid, who has plaster on her arm and is yet not grumpy. What makes the travel exciting is - taking such pictures, singing songs on the way, eating on the roadside, two families sharing one bedroom space in a remote corner of a forest, playing games in the park ... It is the things in-between that we cherish. The excitement does not lie in reaching the final destination but enjoying the in-between which will be always different.

Last weekend while I was at home and took pictures of a sparrow and a rose from my apartment. I did not have to go far beyond to a capture a moment that would make my day. Sometimes things are just around us, and yet we do not appreciate them. We just go searching for them on a trip hundreds of miles away...

(A sparrow in my apartment complex)

(A home grown rose in a pot)