Amol's Innovation Blog

I am an 18 month old father (my son was born 18 months ago ), and my life changed completely, for better, after becoming a father.   Ok, now why do I say ‘better’?    I get to sleep less, have to alter my plans to take him to the doctor, expenses have gone up, unplanned fun outings have reduced to zero, and I hum ‘wheels on the bus’ while taking bath. But life still feels ‘better’ – holding him in my arms and watching him grow everyday is such a joy! A bit of reading revealed that ‘life is better’ feeling is result of better balanced Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin, and Endorphins. (The engineer in me would not just ‘be happy’ and had to find the root cause). To be truthful, newborns / infants are a lot of work, they are messy, fragile, need lot of TLC, you need a village to ‘raise a child’ and you don’t know how they will turn out. But they have possibilities and potential !   Innovative ideas are the same – they are messy, fragile, they kee...

‘Failure’ has received a lot of ‘good press’ in recent years. And as someone who is passionate about Innovation, I am happy to see this positivity around failure. But let’s be clear – not all failures are good, actually some failures can be disastrous. Now, how do we separate the good from the bad? While attending an online course, I stumbled upon a framework proposed by Joel Peterson, Chairman of JetBlue which helped me get clarity on how to spot the ‘right’ failure. Here is how Joel Peterson classifies failure: Failure of Ethics – An Organization / individual indulging in illegal or immoral activities and failing. Failure of Effort - An Organization / individual not putting in all possible effort and thus failing. Failure of Result - An Organization / individual even when acting ethically and exhausting all resources still fails to get the desired results. While pursuing innovation, “Failure of result” is of the ‘good kind’ and we should all be comfort...

“A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be” – Wayne Gretzky This cliché quote from Gretzky has been so overused that people have stopped paying attention to anything that follows it. So why do I bring up this quote in the context of Innovation? I bring it up to highlight that most people using this quote do not talk about difficulty involved in, and practice and patience needed to anticipate where puck is going. So I want to recognize that anticipating where proverbial puck is going is not easy. It requires physical and mental conditioning, developing specific skills and lot of practice. It also requires being comfortable with going to a place where the puck does not arrive. If we want to innovate, we need to get comfortable with not finding the puck where we anticipated it to go. And keep ‘pivoting’ till we become good at reaching as close to puck as we can. Same is the case with Innovation – it is not eas...

During the Second World War, British Royal Air Force faced a serious problem. A lot of fighter planes were being shot down by enemy bullets strafing bottom of the planes. They had a separate division – ORS – Operational research Section - which was working on finding a solution to this problem for about 2 years.  Why was it so difficult? The solution was to provide an additional layer of enforcement, armor plating, to the bottom of fighter planes. But it came with a limitation. They had a limited amount of armor plating they could add and could not cover entire bottom of the plane with this plating because that much additional weight would affect the performance and agility of the plane. So they had to pick a portion of the area that needed most protection.   And that was difficult. They had lot of vulnerable areas they had to protect the pilot, the gunners, the ammunition, the fuel, the fuselage, and so on. They had almost given up on finding the ‘sweet spot...