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SaaS Pricing and Value Metrics – Lessons from the Top Seeds

Two libraries. One charges you based on the number of books that you pick, while for the other, the rental period forms the basis of its prices.

Now, which one would you prefer to get your books from?

There’s no right or wrong answer in this scenario. What matters here is how you were able to make your choice, with a single criteria.

Both libraries cater to the same audience, with the same service, and the single element that tells them apart (besides their librarians’ temperaments) is their pricing strategy. And this one aspect is enough to determine if the libraries will make a fortune or fall headlong.

Your pricing model and strategy could make-or-break your SaaS business; apart from the tangible monetary consequences, it is one of those intangible yardsticks that have a major share of influence on your customer’s/prospect’s perception of your business.

An article published by the Harvard Business Review in 1992 states that a 1% improvement in pricing leads to a whopping 11.1% hike in the operating profit.

”..in SaaS, pricing is tightly coupled to the product itself, which is different from other types of software and non-tech products where the price is decoupled from the product.” – Lincoln Murphy, Customer Success Evangelist

It is that one thread that’s intertwined with every other facet of your business, right from the product, the marketing strategy, the sales strategy, to the company’s bottom line.

Many SaaS ventures who’ve acknowledged its worth have taken the reins to constantly innovate, experiment, and uncover the ideal pricing strategy for their business models. And among the many differentingredients that they employ in putting together a SaaS pricing model, is the “Value Metric”, which is also the protagonist of this post.

Why it’s worth talking about (and why you should keep reading further):

A value metric (also called a pricing dimension or a pricing axis) is basically the foundation of your pricing model – it is the metric depending on which you set your prices. In our earlier illustration of the two libraries, the number of books and the rental period are the metrics of the corresponding libraries.

Looks effortless, huh? There’s more to it than meets the eye.

The value metric literally decides your pricing strategy. It conveys the value each plan proposes to offer your customers, and gives them a valid reason to fork out money for your product. According to Patrick Campbell (the CEO and co-founder of Price Intelligently), the perfect metric should align with your customers’ needs, grow with them and be easy to wrap one’s mind around.

Select the wrong metric and you risk devaluing your offering. Opt for the right one – your customers would actually be happy to upgrade to the next level, as they understand the value that they’ll be receiving by doing so.

“If you are running a SaaS business (or any other kind of software business), it pays to spend some time thinking about your pricing axes. This represents one of the very powerful levers that are available to you to grow your business. (I am surprised by how often I find this has been ignored.)” – David Skok, five-time entrepreneur and General Partner at Matrix Partners

So let’s give this factor the importance that it deserves, and learn a few tricks from these SaaS guys who got it right.

Lesson 1- The Deceptively Simple Pricing Model:

Take a look at Hubspot’s pricing for instance.

They have segmented their plans according to the number of contacts – a deceptively simple move.

This is why. The metric they’ve resorted to is simple and straightforward – no ifs and buts; no little asterisk marks that point to a list of conditions. And yet, the way it works is nowhere close to simple.

Think about it – with its pricing, Hubspot brings more1 value to its customers (who are essentially marketers and salespeople – leads/contacts are the bread and butter for these folks) by letting them manage more contacts, and in the process, it gets a share of the value generated. Even if a customer doesn’t want to upgrade, their growth still benefits Hubspot through the overage charges (based on the extra contacts). In essence, this model allows for a smooth transition of customers from one pricing level to a higher one.

The customer receives value for what they’re paying, a value that the product had promised to give them in the first place. So for a customer, paying more translates to handling more contacts and making more conversions. Hubspot grows, as the customer’s business grows. A win-win!

Lesson 2 – The Aspirational Quotient and the Unambiguous Metric:

Here’s what Freshdesk’s pricing looks like:

Basically, they have a user-based pricing, “users” referring to customer support agents. And they start with a freemium tier, which encompasses almost all the basic features, but with a tiny tweak.

If you look closer, you’ll notice that the freemium plan limits the number of users to 3. This means that a customer who initially signs up for the free scheme would automatically be moved to a paid plan as soon as their user count goes beyond 3. A changeover that’s as smooth as silk.

Another point to make note of, is how they’ve infused an aspirational quotient in their pricing, so that a lower-tier user looks at the higher tiers with an “I want that!” gaze in their eyes.

Let’s say a startup founder signs up for the Sprout plan, a good place to begin with. Once their customer base starts to scale, they start receiving more support questions, and consequently their help desk requirements start increasing as well.

The first demand would obviously be to accommodate more than 3 support staffs. Apart from that, they would also realise the necessity of certain plan-exclusive features. For example the “Agent Collision Detection” feature (which shows a support agent if another agent is working on a ticket) plays a major role in avoiding embarrassment in front of your customers, and in turn improves the team’s efficiency. So in an effort to equip their customer support soldiers with the best possible ammo, the company automatically moves to the pricier plan.

As you can see, Freshdesk has worked out a simple approach to show the users what they’re missing out on and how they would be gaining more from an upgrade.

Another common value metric for customer support and help desk softwares is the number of support tickets. A customer would never be able to pinpoint the exact number of tickets that would be generated for a given period, and they wouldn’t really be pleased to pay for a metric that’s ambiguous.

The key is to have a pricing strategy that works in the interest of the customers as well as that of the business. Groove’s pricing experimentvalidates this fact. They initially grouped their pricing bundles based on the ticket count (with no limit on users), and it clearly didn’t turn out well. They finally settled with the simplest per user pricing model, and this time, they were right with their strategy.

“If our uniqueness comes from being the simplest, easiest app, then our pricing has to reflect that, too.” – Alex Turnbull, CEO & Founder of Groove

Lesson 3 – The Multi-dimensional pricing and the Choice Paradox:

A similar pattern can be found in the Electronic Signature Software segment as well. There’s Adobe’s eSign, where the pricing is hinged on the number of “seats”, or “users” in the common tongue.

Then there’s DocuSign, which bases its pricing bundles on the number of users and at the same time, restricts the number of documents for the two smaller plans. This way, the customer will move up the pricing ladder when the number of documents exceeds the specified limit. And that’s where the deceptively simple pricing comes into play.

Also, both of these pricing slabs have one other common characteristic: plan-specific features. What’s going on here, is that they’ve added another “dimension” or value metric to their pricing model. Freshdesk’s model belongs to this category as well – by making their plans both user and volume driven, they flaunt a multi-dimensional pricing model.

In a one-dimensional model, by focussing on a single dimension, you’re only narrowing your scope, rendering the other differentiating dimensions useless. In other words, you fail to unearth the full revenue potential of your product.

Chargebee’s earlier pricing model was established on just the number of invoices, with all the features available for all the plans. We then realised the flaw in our approach, and what we were losing out on because of this. Subsequently, we’re working on making certain prominent features exclusive for specific packages, and thus making our pricing model a multi-dimensional one.

A word of caution: Multi-dimensional pricing is good. But overdoing it and incorporating a lot of value metrics in your pricing strategy would only backfire, leading to a “Choice Paradox”, where the prospect gets too confused to decide. Use dimensions that are clear, concise and comprehensible, and know where to stop – keep in mind that the buyer’s decision process has to be as frictionless as possible. David Skok recommends a maximum of 3 pricing axes and suggests 2 axes to be the optimal choice.

Lesson 4 – A few other short pointers:

Among the umpteen slip-ups that companies make while arriving at a pricing strategy, is the fixing on the wrong metric(s); this is one error that could lead to critical damage. A research conducted by PWC showed that SaaS pricing leaders have two things in common when it came to their pricing strategy:

  • Their value metrics are derived from their customers’ perceptions
  • Their strategy is easily intelligible, measurable, and workable

In one of our previous posts, we delved deep into the enigmatic question of “What is the right approach to SaaS pricing?”, which led us to some rather interesting conclusions. This was one of them:

There are two interesting rules to SaaS pricing –

  • NEVER break your promises, stick to what you’ve committed.
  • No pricing strategy is perfect. Always be testing.

An inference from that second point right there – “There’s no one-size-fits-all pricing strategy”.

So there you have it.

Choose the metric that would mean something to your customers, and would justify the price that you’re charging them.

Choose the metric that is tied to the core value of your entire offering/promise.

Choose the metric that would set the scene for a win-win situation. Evaluate, rinse, repeat.

Maybe your best possible value metric (and pricing strategy) is just a turn away.

Guest Post by , ChargeBee

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3 Years of Volunteering to enable hundreds of experiments to blossom

AnHRA0C0tF4mI0qO-9WAwf-AXl383SqEDMGC9He_wzNoOn Saturday, I was going to attend 3rd year anniversary event of iSPIRT On the way on my bus to meeting, my mind was filled with varied thoughts about 2010 or earlier, when I was outsourced product start-up employee. Looks like little time ago, 6 years has passed from 2010 when I met the volunteers of NPC. Sharing comments to volunteers (Avinash, Rajan, Vijay, Manju, Suresh) on lack of “Made in India” products, I learnt that their thoughts were similar and more advanced. In addition, while I was talking, they had larger dream to create ecosystem where tech geeks are proud of creating products and the first baby step to create pride to come with products was NPC event.

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For a regular visitor in technical meetups of BLR and volunteer for education and health activities in the weekends, their volunteering style spoke more about the volunteer’s real intent. More interaction made me realize that contribution mattered more than the person’s experience or position. This was firs time I heard people work selflessly as part of industry forum and became curious to understand their concept better, leading to a sense of respect for volunteers, motivating myself to volunteer for NPC 2013. In 2013, iSPIRT was formed as new initiative with focus to create a product nation and volunteers drive the vision of iSPIRT. Today, I continue to see the volunteering spirt even today to be similar or better than my experience in early 2010. Hence I have planned to spend whole day to attend 3 In 2013, iSPIRT was formed as new initiative with focus to create a product nation and volunteers drive the vision of iSPIRT. Today, I continue to see the volunteering spirt even today to be similar or better than my experience in early 2010. Hence I have planned to spend whole day to attend 3rd year anniversary function of iSpirit. This blog represents what I learnt about growth of iSPIRT in 3 years. When the first session on “PlayBooks” started, I started to recall that iSPIRT had started to offer Playbooks as first learning program. Playbooks used to represent all programs offered to start-up entrepreneurs. Targeted entrepreneurs on application were invited to participate in playbooks based on specific stage of their start-up. Being in the ecosystem, I am aware of

      • All programs and events are free for participants. Participants apply to attend program or event with details about their startup and applicant registration is approved based on their suitability to programs theme and approved participants attend event for free.

 

 

    • Programs and events focus to impart learning for a category of start-ups that are present in specific stage of their journey namely start-up enthusiasts, Discovery, Product Market Fit and finally Scale To Grow.

 

6The session shared that iSPIRT is offering 3 learning programs and 3 knowledge events. I did not realize that I myself have been attending some of these events. I still see absence of programs and events for the Discovery stage yet, difficult and tricky stage to cross.

iSPIRT has come with a matured structure around programs and events termed KASH Playbook Framework. Playbook are no more a program and had become umbrella representation for all programs. What does KASH represents?

  • K – Knowledge
  • A – Attitude (Mindset)
  • S – Skills
  • H – Habit

Been an entrepreneur, I can relate with KASH as learning theme for programs offered to entrepreneur’s because all programs aims to impart entrepreneur to gain knowledge, develop a mindset, learn skills, identify habits and practice the same to empowers entrepreneur in current stage to create/generate KASH leading to transition from current stage to next stage.

First pic - 3 years

My view of RoundTable is to help happy & confused startups with product market to scale business. I learnt RoundTable (K, S) continues to be an informal closed door interaction (~4 hour) among entrepreneurs and practitioners facilitated by saddle entrepreneur to learn tacit knowledge & skill. Roundtable started as first program of iSPIRT in 2013.

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My view of PNGrowth is to help scaled startups with product market fit to grow leaps and bounds. I learnt PNGrowth (A) is 3 day bootcamp to shake up and instill ‘Panga’ Mindset requisite for category leadership, followed by a 1 year community support. The first program was in 2016 at Mysore The 3 learning events Innofest, SaaSx, InTech50 are focused on large participants. My view of Innofest is to help creators to explore possibility to transform their creation/hobby in to business. I attended the first I attended the first Innofest (A) that happened in Aug 2015 in Bangalore and nice to hear the event travelled to Hyderabad. I wish that sure more cities are eager to conduct event to help innovators take pride in their products and show case them, get feedback of their application in reality. This is “No copy paste entrepreneurship”. My view of SaaSx is that new entrants gain insights in to the tribal knowledge of experienced SaaS folks which helps them to make their offering better more efficient. SaaSx(K) event is to create & nurture community of SaaS entrepreneurs in India at the SaaS capital of India – Chennai. The first event happened in Chennai in 2014, followed in 2015, which I attended and can vouch for the fact that SaaS entrepreneur’s shared their deep intimate learning with others. My view of InTech50 is as experiment with difference. Instead of startups working hard to engage and partner with large corporates with their product offerings, can we make corporates to come together and engage with startups and share feedback and evolve in to partnership. Reversing approach of startup Push model to build relationship and engagement to Corporate Pull model.  InTech50 showcases software products created by Indian entrepreneurs, with aim to help software product companies to enter global markets via our network of early adopters, partners, co-innovators and investors. Companies apply and Chosen companies receive advice, on-going mentoring, product marketing support, and funding to scale in the global markets. This program comes with a cost cover expenses for two attendees and event logistics. 13
Another session I focused was on “India Stack: Powering thousands of experiments”. Before jumping to understand India Stack and session contents, it is good to start with some history in India of how absence of legacy era in telecom and internet has become Indian advantage over time. With absence of telecom legacy, India skipped analog era and leapfrog to digital era of STDs, leading to leapfrog to mobile usage. With absence of internet legacy, India skipped PC based internet and had leapfrog to era where internet technology is available to every Indian via mobile (computing device of choice). Look at the money savings for India from not having to spend to build legacy infrastructure that becomes obsolete with advent of new technologies and money goes waste.

This enables every Indian to access and consume service offered by internet software and mobile apps over internet. It is time to dream and create experiments to leverage this leapfrog benefit to enable Indians to leapfrog to make use of digital applications and the Indian government has jumped in to same with Digital India campaign. One see two fundamental changes happening.

  1. Every Indian can access and use mobile apps, with mobile phones in hands of every Indian.
  2. Every Indian is getting used to electronic banking and payments fueled by e-commerce players.

iSPIRT wants to dreams along with Indian government with belief that this is right time that Indian entrepreneur’s need to leverage Digital explosion wave expected in India soon. One can dream in terms of how technology can be leveraged to create financial inclusion, how apps can create positive interventions in areas of education and health care. When you dream, you are motivated with the potential to leapfrog tech-starved Indians to tech- savvy Indian.
12Dreams are ideas to start with. Dreams need to follow with action to reality. For such a dream to happen, iSPIRT has seen itself a role to contribute to seamless working between entrepreneurs and with government agencies and regulators and has started to proactively engage with government. This joint engagement with stakeholders of Indian government enabled iSPIRT to propose 4 recommendation to serve as backbone for Indian government to realize the dream of Digital India.

          • OpenAPI Policy objectives recommended for Digital India programs

 

      • 7 key principles for to be adhered for implementing Digital India programs.

 

      • Technology Stack to serve as baseline for developing apps for Digital India

 

      • India Stack to serve as baseline for implementing Digital India.

 

              iSPIRT has recommended these OpenAPI policy objectives

          1. Software interoperability: APIs are recommended for all e-governance applications and systems, enabling quick and transparent integration across these applications and systems.

 

        • No Government Silos: Information and data shall be shared through a secure and reliable sharing mechanism across various e-Governance applications and systems.

 

        • Data available to public: Make people’s data public. Provide APIs to enable people to view data.

 

        • Baseline guidelines for Implementers Provide guidance to Government Organizations to develop, publish and use these Open APIs

 

  iSPIRT has recommended these 7 key principles to be followed in developing application by government and integration layer with government applications. 3
The 3 learning programs IKEN, RoundTable and PNGrowth are focused on limited participants.

My view of IKEN to help startup enthusiasts aware of challenges to enable self-assess of their strengths and to identify needed self-improvements. I learnt IKEN (S, H) is a 10 weekend boot-camp for early/Novice entrepreneurs and startup enthusiasts and focuses on life skills of an Entrepreneur along with business skills. The first program was created in 2015 in consultation with effectuation with Prof Saras and happened multiple times in Bangalore.

Picture 2 - three years

Based on OpenAPI Policy and guideline principles, here is robust technology stack recommended for creating innovative solutions to India’s hard problems.

Picture 3

With payments being accelerated by regulatory Innovation and a continuous rise of smart phones, here is robust solution stack recommended for developing Digital India applications.

Picture 4

What I liked about iSPIRT is

  • Supporting entrepreneur’s with learning that they need and that is not easily available.
  • Focus to get feedback for their initiatives and working to bring a structure to their work.
  • Contribute by promoting and facilitating the use of IndiaStack creating curiosity and real interest.

If APIs are made open, secure and available for developers (through sandbox), I am sure iSpirt would jump to volunteer to evangelize IndiaStack APIs and promote IndiaStack APIs through Hackathons and developer Events.

To end with, Saturday meeting made me realize that iSpirt has matured from an unstructured volunteer initiative for entrepreneurs and is on the path to become think tank to create product nation.
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Guest Post by G. Srinivasan, 

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Planting the Start-up Gene in Enterprise IT

Every company in its inception is a start-up. However, excelling and remaining relevant in an ever changing, competitive market eventually transforms ‘start-ups’ into enterprises that follow a set of conventional/’safe’ methods of doing business in order for them to become profitable and remain so in the long run.  Conversely, the current start-up buzz is posing fundamental questions to the enterprise. Can enterprises imbibe innovation, agility & turn ideas into products or solutions in  a short period of time?  Can enterprises showcase the DNA that kept them ahead of the pack when they started their operations?

Times have changed, and so have the methods of doing business and there is much to learn from start-ups today.

PM Narendra Modi’s ‘Start-up’ India movement has provided a much needed impetus to budding entrepreneurs and encourage them to establish their own businesses. With tax exemption of first three years and faster patent registrations, this is just the start to a whole new business environment. The DNA of start-ups is booming with innovation. Leaders and thinkers across the world have pondered the subject but what got my attention is this one by Rorie Devine whose view is that three things that Corporate IT can learn from Start-ups 1. The right attitude, 2. The ability   to constantly test and measure, and 3. To not think like a dinosaur. This last, in my view is key. Rorie says and I quote ‘To be agile and survive, big companies need to organize themselves as a collection of small, independent, self-organizing teams doing the right thing at the right time.’

Innovation is only possible when the organization and each member of the organization is committed and passionate to the idea of breaking through the clutter and to shine above. I can well argue that for most part Enterprise IT has imploded (into itself?) as a result of the very size, complexity and process adherence that has made it enterprise quality in the first place. That said, there are a large number of enterprises that continue to break boundaries at the technology infrastructure level in order to deliver noteworthy innovation for business. The theme for NetApp’s annual innovation awards this year is ‘Planting the Start-up Gene in Enterprise IT: Accelerating Innovation’ celebrates this breakthrough spirit every year, but we believe that there is a new urgency driven by, but not limited to, shrinking budgets and increased competition. We at NetApp want to recognize the efforts and risks taken by start-ups to out think the ecosystem. There are definite insights to be gained from India’s successful Start-ups, particularly around how they have engineered their technology backbone to plan for innovation and mushrooming growth – within the new business ecosystem.

This takes us to the idea of organizing oneself for growth and innovation. We at NetApp tell Start-ups to plan for growth, and to therefore organize their IT infrastructure into easily expandable additive blocks that can scale up or down easily. The value of using a set of smaller parts for best performance and efficiency is not new. Advance planning is critical to their survival as unlike larger organizations they cannot afford to make errors and see themselves going into a dark abyss. Trust forms a valuable component to their success which comes with the assurance of providing quality products and services to customers.

And for the enterprise, it is important for us to break ourselves into small competitive groups within – to build, create & spur disruptions in the market place – accelerate innovation and become a platform for new ideas like the start-ups.

Guest post by Parag Amalnerkar, Netapp

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2016 iSPIRT Annual Letter

AnHRA0C0tF4mI0qO-9WAwf-AXl383SqEDMGC9He_wzNoSeven years ago a band of volunteers came together to move the Indian software product ecosystem into the next orbit. Three years ago this movement became a think tank, iSPIRT. We pioneered the idea of building public goods without public money in India. Today, India has many software product Unicorns and many more are in the making. We are doing one M&A a month. India Stack is reshaping many sectors especially the financial sector. And, the Government of India recognizes the power of startups and have started changing their systems to enable us. This has been a long and a fun journey for us all. This letter captures what we have been up to, our learnings and our dreams.

Bharat Goenka, Jay Pullur, Naveen Tewari, Sharad Sharma, Vishnu Dusad

Governing Council, iSPIRT Foundation, 4th Feb 2016

 

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Startup India: What Can You Do?

At the Startup India event, our honourable PM shared that government’s impact is highest when it decides, intentionally, to stay away, and I agree with him. But we, as the citizens of India, can play a huge role. And we must.

But as a co-founder of NowFloats, a startup, here are some of my asks to you, my fellow citizens, and you may fall under multiple categories:

To Consumers: Sincerely, kindly adjust.

Like most of you, I have cursed Ola/Uber as much when the driver cannot read the GPS. Many of NowFloats’ over 200,000 customers escalate to me directly. All this is a part of the startup journey. We learn from this and hopefully act fast enough on it. So, please crib to us (speaking for all startups here), act obnoxious, throw a fit, expect the best-in-the-world quality, but don’t give up on us! Because we will fix things, once we get that next round of capital or find more efficient ways to train the drivers or the sales people.

To Enterprises: Startups are a feature, not a bug.

When a startup comes calling, please keep aside your desire to be an entrepreneur. That is a parallel process and highly encouraged, because it will make you adopt the new technology or product. If you are unable to do this, you may be unable to do that startup either (#harsh), where you are required to be a new person every single day (#think). So when a startup approaches you, it’s an opportunity to understand the latest technology, perhaps even get feedback on your own business plan. It’s not the time to feel left-out or ask questions that make you go ‘I could have done this so much better’. BTW, almost all startups are happy to discount their product (or even make it free), if you just agree to adopt (#hint).

To Investors: Stay true to your investment thesis and stage.

An angel investor is (and should be) very different from an institutional seed, and this should be very different from a Series A and so on. Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches, and therefore only the stage-walla investor knows what the entrepreneur needs. Angels will typically give money based on trust and that’s all they should be bothered about. Blume Ventures (for example) is a seed stage investor and they understand their thesis and stage well. They don’t ask for monthly, 10-page reports from all companies but watch out for the ones who are sending these pro-actively. Their support and help is different for each and they will spend significant resources to deliver ‘personalized’ mentoring to each startup. This will not be the case at Series B, when the startup has its resources (now) to find (read pay) for external support. Our Series A investors, Omidyar Network, puts the next stage of pressure on us, helping us with higher growth and velocity.

To Government: Stay hungry, stay away.

In my opinion, the government has already done something that even they don’t realize it, yet! While some of the policy changes expected by startups remain open (refer my pre-event opinion in Mint & iSPIRT’s 34 point asks), but many were awesome starts. And by doing what the government did, they have unleashed a (wonderful) monster. They made the world (to borrow from them), stand-up and take note. This aircraft has taken off and it’s not landing anytime soon, supported by mid-air refuelling of new and relevant policies in future. Things will just have to happen given the velocity on the numbers and stuff we see every single day (see Digital Desh) (#no #choice).

To Family: Stay.

The real entrepreneurs are the families of entrepreneurs’, even though this was forced on them. To them I have to say only two things: Thank you and please stay the course. Pass or fail, this experience is going to change your family for generations. Just take my word, send your partner that home-made food (to save money and health) and… Stay! (#rockstars)

About Me

I am Jasminder Singh Gulati (@GulatiSinghJ), worked at global corporates for over 18 years, including 12 years at Microsoft before co-founding NowFloats in 2012 with Ronak Kumar Samantray, Nitin Jain, and Neeraj Sabharwal. NowFloats helps local businesses get a meaningful digital presence that connects the business with local consumers, resulting in higher revenue & profits. Over the past 3 years, NowFloats has over acquired over 200,000 customers (90% of them in India) and drives over 6M consumers to them every month. NowFloats has 6 patents, all ‘Made in India’.

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Turbocharging #StartupIndia

Maker Culture’ and ‘Make in Universities Programs’ for creating a cultural change in Engineering Graduates; to be job creators rather than job seekers. 

Our nation is faced with an exciting challenge – it needs to create over 1M new jobs every month for the next 20 years to give employment to the 200M youth who will join the work force.

These jobs will have to come from new companies; and therein lays the paramount significance of creating a fundamental shift in our higher education system where the most brilliant minds are trained to be job creators (of new knowledge, employment and wealth) in the society, than be job seekers.

A strong case study – Kerala has been a front-runner in social indices and literacy; but the lack of timely changes in higher education and their inability to be in tune with the industry job requirements, has created a situation where the state has around 25lac unemployed but highly literate youth. The contrast is stark as the state has around 25Lac migrant laborers for blue collared jobs.

As every challenge presents in itself an opportunity, Kerala which had almost no startups and little to show for entrepreneurship culture, took the first step into student entrepreneurship by announcing the Student Entrepreneurship Policy in 2012.

This landmark policy gave engineering students 20% attendance and 4% grace marks every semester. Today, there are more than 200 student startups In Kerala and the promising early signs of a growing startup ecosystem.

The visionary Vice Chancellors of Gujarat Technical University and Kerala Technical University have now come together and are at the forefront of creating the University Student Startup Policies to support these changes across affiliated colleges. With over 1 million students joining the engineering stream every year across India, the education system needs a serious overhaul.

Changes in Curriculum for the Startup Era

The engineering syllabus needs to undergo major changes, in order to be in tune with the national objectives of the ‘Make in India Program.’

Every first year student has to compulsorily take the Practical Workshop classes as a part of the degree certificate. Thus, students in 2016 still learn carpentry, smithy, fitting, plumbing, sheet metal and lathe. We have to move from this system designed for the 1980’s to the Digital Manufacturing Era of 3-D printing, Milling Machines, Laser Cutters, 3-D Modeling and CNC Machines. This change is needed to create world-class hardware and software product designers who can then build and create the next Apple and Google from India.

Professor Neil Gershenfield, the Head of the Center of Bits and Atoms at MIT, Boston teaches a course called “How to make almost anything”. This course is also available online and by upgrading our workshops to Digital Fabrication Labs (Fablabs), we can encourage our engineering students to “make things” rather than learn theory lessons. Around 400 such Fablabs are present around the world, while India today has nine.

Converting Final Year Projects to Startups – A real taste of industry

All Engineering students have to also submit a final year project as part of the degree certificate. Currently, this is a non-imaginative and near repetition of what was done by the previous senior batch.

Instead of a theoretical final year project, creating a startup project allows students to create real products that can be used by customers. Leading Universities such as Stanford allow such programs where undergraduate students can do projects on Facebook or Google, getting a taste of the best in-class technologies that are being used by the industry.

Creating a startup while in college also means that students work together in groups. In the real world, everyone works in teams but we have an education system that is tuned for individual excellence. Student teams can now build prototypes of products every six months and by the time they graduate, they would have worked on 3-4 product ideas.

Along with the Software Product Industry Think-Tank iSPIRT, a program is being planned where young students across Universities in India can be allowed to work with cutting edge startups.

Introducing Online Education from world class Universities.

The lack of adequate faculty has been a key problem in introducing ‘Make in Universities’ till now. With massively open and online courses (MOOC’s), students can now learn cutting edge courses in machine learning and big data from many leading universities around the world.

Almost 95% of startups fail commercially. However, with over 9B USD (58,000Crores) in investments in 2015 alone, the students who are building technically successful products gain real world skills in using next generation technologies and become highly in-demand graduates for startup jobs.

The stage is set for the Prime Minister to convert these early experiments into National Frameworks. By scaling up the blueprint of University Startup Policy at Gujarat and Kerala across the nation as a ‘Make in Universities Program’, it would contribute significantly in creating a great pipeline of skilled talent and innovative ideas, which would help transform India from a ‘developing’ economy to a ‘developed’ economy in the knowledge era.

Guest Post by Sanjay Vijayakumar – Founder of Startup Village, India’s first PPP Model Technology Incubator. He is a part of iSPIRT’s Product Circle. He is also a Member of Board of Governors of APJ Abdul Kalam Kerala Technological University. 

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Why govts should open source software it develops?

I am surprised not to find a single Indian govt software being open sourced. This is despite the fact that most of them have horrible user experience and highly buggy. In all probability the code behind it would be equally poor.

The govt. continues to spend crores of tax payers money to IT service providers to develop these abysmal portals instead of open sourcing it.

Examples of some portals that I used personally:

  1. Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) complaint portal
  2. LIC portal
  3. IRCTC ticketing portal
  4. RTI portal
  5. MSEB bill payment
  6. I wont be surprised if this is true for most govt. sites/apps.

Each of them to say the least have poor user experience and worse is highly buggy. E.g., I logged a complaint in the PMC portal and got an email with ticket ID. To my surprise when I logged back in the portal after a week, there were 0 open, pending or closed tickets in my account!

Why open source?

First of all its built using tax payers’ money. Why should be is hidden property unless there is some trade secret involved in it?

Secondly, why would every state, municipal and even country“reinvent the wheel”? E.g. if Pune builds a complaint management system, why should Pimpri Chinchwad have to build another one for itself? If Maharastra builds a software for vehicle management (RTO office) why should rest of the states build another? And just a different state, even someone in Sri Lanka or Nairobi can reuse it.

Thirdly, India has the highest number of programmers in the world. Most of them are bored or frustrated in their day job, and looking for an exciting side project to work on. They would be more than willing to contribute for free to such projects. Its not only exciting but also a sense of society contribution involved. Similarly students doing college projects are another source of free hours that can be utilized. As in any open source project, you need strong gate-keeping to ensure quality of code contributed is high. Its is very easily doable as is done in 1000s of open source projects across the globe.

Fourth, if and when, for whatever reason govt has to change the vendor who is in-charge of developing the portal, it will be very easy to make the transition since the code is publicly available. Govt wont be at the mercy of a single vendor for life.

Overall, “open source” is an important aspect of “open government” after “open data”. Its a no-brainier that all government projects have to be open source unless confidential information of national or trade secret is involved. Especially in the context of smart-city and digital India, this will be critical since government spend on IT is expected to go up exponentially.

Unfortunately, no one has come forward to do it. The only reason could be vested interests of the IT services companies i.e. cartel between decision makers and software companies. Naturally open sourcing is not great for them since it will mean lesser projects and worse their “code quality” will be exposed to the whole world.

Hopefully we will see this change in the near future. Being an open source product developer myself, I will be happy to help any organization in learning more and moving towards open sourcing their projects — for free of cost.

PS: We are developers of OpenSpecimen — an free and open source software for clinical research centers.

Guest Post by Srikanth Adiga, OpenSpecimen

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Leading the fintech revolution | The humane approach

Let’s start first with the elucidation of a buzzword that is floating around a lot –‘fintech’. In very simple terms, it refers to new technology that aims to change the existing models (and/or processes) of the financial industry. Considering that financial industry by itself is huge and everybody is a part of it directly or indirectly, it is quite logical that the tech and business community is extremely interested in being a part of it.

The good part is that this domain is complicated and definitely tough to crack. Now some of you might be wondering that how exactly is this good?! And the answer for that is as per my opinion, the harder a problem is to solve, the better the solutions (and even more original) are, that come forward for it for the long term. This is enforced even more when I look across other sectors – viz Rocket technologies, Transportation, Artificial Intelligence and so on. Remember we are talking about products & services that aim for the bigger picture and not just stay for a short while.

The second aspect that gets everyone excited is the potential impact that this has on the complete economy, be it in a funnel up fashion or the typical trickle down manner. Being deeply linked with the pockets and spending behavior (in general) of the people, the growth levels in fintech sector tend to have a very deep correlation with the elusive economic development at a global level. So far so good, but is the current pace really radical and path-breaking or is it simply incremental? The answer varies but involves a very important element…

As part of our product development and iterations here @MyPoolin, we have come to appreciate something that many of the fin-tech players intuitively know (but don’t directly implement) – ‘the humane touch‘. We don’t really mean touch in the physical sense (as most of the solutions that we refer to are mostly software level to the tune of 95% or more) but in the sense of user experience for the end consumer. The primary aspect that makes this so significant is because in the past, the banking solutions have seemed too complicated and aloof to majority of the people. That is the main reason people still spend hours in their respective bank branches per week!

PictureforblogHence, our principle is simple – “Let people come in for the utility. Present it in the simplest manner. And let them discover the power of a humane touch”. 

Cheers to making amazing things happen in the financial world that actually seem a natural part of our daily lives, making them all the more beautiful ….

P.S. MyPoolin is a mobile peer to peer and social payments network. It is changing the way we all plan and share money with friends and colleagues.

Guest Post by Rohit Taneja, MyPoolin

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3 Days to remember : 200+ Entrepreneurs , Inspiring mentors and a life-changing workshop – @PNGrowth 2016.

It was an eventful Friday morning – 7 buses with more than 200 attendees made their way to Infosys campus, Mysore, the venue for a 3-day entrepreneurial retreat.  #PNGROWTH 2016, was handcrafted by iSPIRT foundation and  academia professionals of  Stanford and Duke school of businesses for Indian Start-ups. Each bus was assigned a bus facilitator and Pallav Nadhani, who set the ice-breaker game rolling in our bus.

 

Infosys Campus, Mysore is one of the best campuses one can experience. We were highly-charged with great energy and enthusiasm after a delicious lunch that was arranged at the venue by the organizers.

PN Growth Collage

Enter, Day-1 Session.  

The agenda was focussed on crafting visions statements, setting goals and identifying scopes.  We were assigned partners, asked to exchange information about our company, our vision, goals and scopes and also gave feedback to one another.  Thanks to ways we’re programmed, our feedback was sugar-coated, attempted to never offend anybody with our brutal expressions. Little did we know that this exercise had a greater purpose until Sharad Sharma insisted  “Sugar-coating was never the name of this game!” The session was an eye-opener for many of us, as he explained that it was important to learn the art of calling out on somebody’s bullshit on their face. This exercise put every one of us into deep-thinking, unlearning and reconciliation.

Relevant Tweets:

https://twitter.com/sharads/status/686200805024608256

https://twitter.com/manjulogic/status/685732899727884288

https://twitter.com/prasanna_says/status/686800624772485120

Day 2 , 9th Jan Saturday

PNgrowth 2016, was essentially designed to construct a mindset wherein entrepreneurs need to ascend from just being profitable to becoming a category leader.  As the first step, each of us had to get to the grass-root level of what “unfair advantage” our businesses offer.  Adding to it, we were asked to analyze many other aspects of our businesses. The PN Growth ecosystem is so solid, that this mentorship program not only helps new-generation and budding entrepreneurs of product companies to learn from peers, but also strengthen the startup ecosystem with the sound knowledge on how to run a business like a visionary.  This one-of-a-kind experience of business modelling was presented to us based on combined efforts of industry unicorns and academic professionals from Duke & Stanford.

Tweets:

https://twitter.com/amitsomani/status/685728303479574528

https://twitter.com/SarangLakare/status/686126760451244032

Day 3, Jan 10th  Sunday

The enriching conversations and the beam of positive vibes injected by mentors is what made this retreat a fun learning experience.  It was Sunday morning and it never felt like it . The third day was designed to focus on putting every learning that we had gained over day 1 and 2 into action.  During this implementation, we were not only able to define action items for the early-stage and growth-stage of the businesses, but also understand and prioritize each of these action items. “Shark Tank”, one of the most valuable sessions at the event happened. Every participating company was given a 15-minute slot to present their idea. The mentors questioned us,  gave feedback and also guidance. This collaborative mentoring was priceless.  Our special thanks to all the learning coaches who took their precious time off their busy schedules to contribute to the community and a big shout out to the iSPIRT team,  especially Avinash Raghava and Sharad Sharma to make this event happen. Everyone of them have been a wonderful source of inspiration and exuberating great passion and energy.

Tweets:

https://twitter.com/prasanna_says/status/686191914043887617

PN Growth program has helped shape many of us to build great companies and for that, a great deal of thanks! We are now driven by this one superordinate goal of becoming a category leader. India is already proud of many such companies and many more will get there soon. They say “all good things come to end”– but for PN Growth members this is just the beginning!

Guest Post by Arvind Parthiban , CEO – Zarget (A/B Testing & Heatmap Software)

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Prof. Sharique’s(Stanford’s) email to internal iSPIRT community

Dear iSPIRT Family,

I wanted to follow up with an update from the PNgrowth team at iSPIRT. A little less than a year ago, a small group of iSPIRT volunteers proposed something unconventional:

We would run a bootcamp to jolt 200 growth stage entrepreneurs from India to aspire to category leadership. The bootcamp would combine learnings from strategy courses taught at Duke and Stanford with detailed case studies of Indian companies such as InMobi, Zoho, Paytm and more. More radically, we would eschew the Sage-on-Stage model for 3 days of active learning where founders worked with peer and mentor support to rethink their own startup’s raison d’etre. To provide as intensive an experience as possible we would have morning and evening breakout sessions and the bootcamp would be fully residential with accommodation, food and transport from Bangalore available to all participants. Finally, we would do this with only minimal cost to the participants. In early 2015, something of this complexity and scale seemed not just unconventional, but improbable.

As many of you know, last week a team of nearly 30 iSPIRT volunteers pulled off the PNgrowth bootcamp in Mysore for 200 growth stage startups. The response before and after has been tremendous, and we have learned much in the process. After the bootcamp, participants have taken to social media to share their experiences. A few examples on the iSPIRT blog:

https://pn.ispirt.in/top-10-observations-of-pngrowth-camp/

https://pn.ispirt.in/le-lo-panga-lets-make-india-a-product-nation/

https://pn.ispirt.in/whats-your-unfair-advantage-pngrowth/

And read the many tweets on #PNgrowth:

https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%23PNgrowth&src=typd

Now, with some experience under our belts, we hope to continue working with the PNgrowth participants over the course of the year, learning about their startups and providing help and resources when possible. But, if producing many category leaders from India is the ultimate goal, then even the best organized 3-day bootcamp will be insufficient. So, as 2016 begins, a small group of volunteers is beginning to reimagine even bolder ways to help India’s product entrepreneurs. The ideas are likely to be audacious and unconventional, but that might be what it takes.

Thank you,

Sharique
An incomplete list of the volunteers who made PNgrowth possible:

Aaron Chatterji – Duke University; Amit Somani – Prime Ventures; Aneesh Reddy – Capillary Technologies; Avlesh Singh – WebEngage; Kunal Shah – FreeCharge; Manav Garg – Eka; Manjula Sridhar – ArgByte; Nags – [24]7 Inc; Pallav Nadhani – FusionCharts; Phanindra Sama – Former redBus; Prasanna Krishnamoorthy – Microsoft Ventures; Sanat Rao – iSPIRT; Sanjay Deshpande – Uniken; Sanjay Shah – Zapty; Shankar Maruwada – EkStep; Shekhar Kirani – Acces; Sumanth Raghavendra – Deck; Avinash Raghava – iSPIRT; M. Thiyagarajan(Rajan) – Intuit; Sandeep Todi – Remitr; Rohit Veerarajappa – Wow Labz; Praveen Hari – Thinkflow; Manu Jolly – Student; Tanish Thakker – Zone Startups; Rem Koning – Stanford GSB; Sharique Hasan – Stanford GSB; Solene Delecourt – Stanford GSB; Randy Lubin – FactoryX; Gokul K S – PNgrowth; Sairam Krishnan – iSPIRT; Hrishikesh Kulkarni – Freshdesk; Senthil Kanthaswamy – Freshdesk; Sharad Sharma – iSPIRT.

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“What’s your Unfair Advantage ?” #PNgrowth

This was one of the questions posed as a challenge to all startup founders at the #PNGrowth Camp last week. We all thought that we had the magic sauce or the unfair advantage that will help us build category leadership companies, only to realise that most of us did not.

200 startup founders across the country, spanning different domains had participated in the PNGrowth Camp at the Mysore Infosys Campus last week (Jan 8-10). It was the first ever such large gathering of Indian Founders at a single bootcamp.   This was organised by iSpirt to nurture the Indian startup Ecosystem to help founders create more successful ventures.

The Advantage had to pass the following criteria to be qualified as an Unfair Competitive advantage.

– An Advantage that

  • you could derive value out of.
  • cannot be copied.
  • is quantifiable.

Putting this to test, most of us realised that we did not have the unfair advantage.

In the “North Star” module, we explored how much we have stayed true to the core goals and vision we started out with and how much we have steered away from. A small digression initially looking harmless, takes us far far away from the original goal over a period of time. In the day to day running of a startup and firefighting, we often forget the big picture, missing the forest for the trees. This module bought us back to the core.

“Your network is your networth” is a well known adage.

In the “IPO module”, we got to know where we stood w.r.t leveraging our network (Information, People and Organisations – IPO). We explored what missing connections we needed to take our startups to the next level.

In the “Shark Tank” module,  mentors reviewed our actions plans and gave us candid and honest feedback on what we need to do. This was the best part of the whole program for me to be picked and my startup strategy reviewed, and getting candid feedback.

Overall, this 3 day bootcamp was a great transformation experience to get my bearings right, get honest feedback from mentors and peers, make a lot of new connections, revisit some of the assumptions and have a solid plan to execute.

Thanks to iSPIRT team and #PNGrowth program team members for giving us this “Unfair Advantage”!

Guest Post by Shashi Bhushan, HealthMacro

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Le lo PANGA- Let’s make India a Product Nation

PNgrowth

I am Amit Mishra – running a SaaS venture Interview Mocha, a pre-employment skill testing company. In this blog I am sharing my experiences from PNgrowth 2016 and how it transformed the way we (Indian product startups) think.

Brief about PNgrowth

  • PNgrowth helps you redesign your startup to win.
  • 2 1/2 days resident full-time programme organized at Infosys Mysore campus from 8th Jan 2016 to 10th Jan 2016.
  • Arranged by iSPIRT and supported by Stanford, Duke.
  • 200 curated Indian product startup founders attended it from every corner of India – metro, non-metro.

Who I am writing this for?

  • Thousands of Indian product startup founders who couldn’t attend it or are willing to attend it in future.

Why am I writing this?

  • To let Indian product startup founders know that you are not alone.
  • To boost up their confidence.
  • My cent to promote iSPIRT to make India a product nation.

My takeaways, thoughts, learnings as below –

1.  Good News! We are supported by reliable Ecosystem.

Acche din ane wale hai!

I was amazed and ecstatic to see, we are genuinely supported by iSPIRT, Infosys, Stanford, Duke and dozens of entrepreneurs who have been there and done that. Infosys (an IT services company) helping us (product startups) made me write a slogan for PNGrowth programme– “Powered by Infosys, Driven by Intellects”.

2.  The Journey is not lonely.

Journey_Is_Not_Lonely

Here, there, everywhere – all product startups.

200 product startups at one place – amazing feeling to know that we are not lonely. The road less travelled is not so lonely and dark anymore.

3.  Bade Bhai log are at rescue.

Bade_bhai_log

Bade Bhai (and behan) log were selflessly helping, sharing experiences, showing realities, shaping up our dream, challenging us to take PANGA (to take on fight) with world leaders, saying bullshit quite often to what we do ;)

Thanks, Hats off, Salute bade Bhai log. Keep helping :-) I will join your bandwagon soon :-)

4.  What was told? and What it meant?

Below I list down the crux of what was told and what it meant during numerous sessions, peer reviews, seminars, campfire sessions, spark sessions, coffee/meal breaks in the programme. Key points are

  1. Learn to say no.
  2. Aim to take category leadership position in your own category. Otherwise, you are in bullshit.
  3. Having Vision (belief) and North Star for your business is a must.
  4. Companies in the past are not successful by accidents or incidents. Unfair advantage is the key to success.
  5. Leverage ecosystem – PIO(People, Information and Organizations).
  6. Take PANGA with the leaders in your category from the day one.
  7. Have action plan to grow 10x in 2016.

So, all the startup guys out there – are you ready for the great Indian PANGA!

And yes, YARO MAINE PANGA LE LIYA ;)

Guest Post by Amit Mishra, InterviewMocha

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Top 10 Observations of #PNgrowth camp

#1. Volunteers: They deserve beyond a standing ovation. They have not only just volunteered- they passionately executed – Awesome job, and hats off.

#2. Participants: They are the best part of this program. Everywhere there is energy, and everyone wants to meet someone new. Great listeners who are wholeheartedly and passionately pursuing their dreams. Everyone of them will be a great leader and make India very proud. They think, live, breathe, every moment about how they can make a meaningful difference to someone’s life. Their ideas are amazing and are solving very specific problem.

Good to see so many first time entrepreneurs with over 15 years of professional experience. The domain knowledge brings completely different value to the ecosystem. Instead of building completely different and disruptive ideas, they are optimizing and creating an incremental value by solving problems in the current system itself. These are big opportunities especially with country over a billion population, great opportunity for many category leaders.

#3. Speakers & Coaches: Amazing delivery. Very interactive and precise. Rather than being on the stage, they walked around showed us that the were with us and available within arms-reach. I enjoyed every second.

#4. Program: It was planned, designed and delivered well by accomplished entrepreneurs and top academicians. The simple and easy workflow streamlined thoughts and reiterated quickly, brilliant!

#5. Discipline: There was Pin drop silence many times during the workshop- hard to do with 200 high energy founders in one room. No cell phone rings, no side conversations, or laptop clicks. It was a bold idea to use whistling many times to override the energetic tea breaks

  #6. Campus: It was inspiring and majestic. Every inch was sparkling clean and amazing positive vibes everywhere. The choice of this campus was brilliant as it was designed and built to create great leaders. Thanks to Infosys for the opportunity.   #7: Food: There was a question once about how many of you are still following your new year resolution diet and only few hands were up. I think most of us took diet as one of our resolutions and we gave up these three days. Believe me, it was hard to resist.

#8. Brutal Feedback: Many may disagree about the first day “Brutally Strong” feedback, but it was a needed one to push out of the comfort zone and give more power to the peer-to-peer learning. The next two days were completely unbiased and brutally honest discussions. We are warriors and came here to train to win the battle. If we get hurt ,we don’t look at our wounds or worry about the bleeding-we will swing our sword stronger and push the enemy back so we took it in the right spirit.

#9. Schedule: The program was designed for 16 hours a day, from 6 am to 10 pm. After that we caught up on burning issues or socialized beyond midnight and showed up at 6 am next day. We are all entrepreneurs and used to the 18 hours days, so thanks to the organizers for your confidence in us to give our all.

#10. Giving back: The camp is giving back to the country by highly successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders to create more winners and more jobs. It refueled and reignited the startup engine for a long journey.We all have an opportunity to give back every day by sharing the knowledge and mistakes or feedback to the fellow entrepreneurs as participants. What I’ve realized in my last 8 years as an entrepreneur is giving back is actually getting back in bigger value. (Mostly in the form of knowledge of do’s and don’t’s.) We all have an obligation to support the great initiatives of iSpirt to make India a great nation.
prabhakan

Guest post by Prabakaran “Praba” Murugaiah, TechFetch.com 

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iSPIx is a Public Good that will help us in our vision of making India a Product Nation.

The Indian Software Product industry has undoubtedly become a burgeoning sector. It is on way to claim a significant share of the global mutli-billion dollar enterprise software product industry. iSPIx-B2B is an initiative from iSPIRT to put exact numbers on this exciting growth story.

iSPIx stands for ‘Indian Software Product Industry Index’ and read as ‘i-specs’. The index essentially captures the value of the top 30 Indian B2B Software Product companies along with a bunch of other statistics and information (employee numbers, company profile, product focus, funding type etc.). While the general data is used to get a broad picture of the industry profile, the key piece of information in this exercise, is the anonymize and aggregated valuation figure of the top 30 companies. This is used as a metric to gauge the size and growth of the Indian Software Product industry.

To our pleasant surprise, this turned out to be a $10.25 Billion figure recording double digit growth rates!  These 30 companies are gunning across the business horizontals and verticals with their strong product portfolios. They directly employ over 21000 people. Click on this info-graphic to know who these 30 companies are (listed alphabetically and not terms of value size).


This iSPIRT hangout did provide an overview of the iSPIX initiative by iSPIRT and why it is necessary for the product ecosystem with its focus on B2B companies in the Indian context. The Indian B2B software product industry has been growing nicely outside of the spotlight – the enterprise value of the top 30 companies is $10.25 billion (₹65,500 crores) and they employ over 21,000 people. With such encouraging growth and global focus, it becomes important to see what insights we can gather about this relatively unsung group of companies.

The Hangout was moderated by Sharad Sharma, Co-Founder, iSPIRT and had Dev Khare, Fellow at iSPIRT & Partner at LightSpeed India & Raghu, Fellow at iSPIRT

To our pleasant surprise, this turned out to be a $10.25 Billion figure recording double digit growth rates!  These 30 companies are gunning across business horizontals and verticals with their strong product portfolios and directly employ over 21000 people. Click on this info-graphic to know who these 30 companies are (listed alphabetically and not terms of value size).

Read the November 2015 edition of the iSPIx-B2B report to know more and watch the video if you are curious about how we put the index together.

We believe iSPIx is a Public Good that will help us in our vision of making India a Product Nation.

Guest Post by Raghu, Fellow at iSPIRT

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Chart your Growth curve to be relevant.

Growth through innovation is much discussed these days as most other paths for growth have been exhausted. The innovations that get easy acceptance are those that create significant value for the Customer. This value should be the basis of product differentiation.

Most of the innovation initiatives in the industry are targeted for growth by extending into the technology or market adjacencies. The real opportunity for growth is through transformational innovation – new technologies for new markets. New technologies, many of them disruptive, are entering the market (Additive manufacturing, Autonomous vehicles, Delivery by Drones etc). The market needs are also continuously changing – there are times when the market is ahead of technology and there are times when the technology is ahead of the market. The synchronization of technology and the market is one of the success factors for growth through innovation.

When we develop new technologies for new markets, there are two types of risks – technology risk (we may or may not succeed in developing the technology, the technology may or may not give the expected performance) and market acceptance risk (this is about the diffusion of technology among the users). One way to mitigate these two risks is to visualize multiple scenarios of the future and systematically track the evolution of each scenario objectively. The innovations are directed by the technology paths that lead to these future scenarios.

Growth through innovation is best achieved through a systematic and well-structured approach. iEnabler’s growth framework removes the process complexity through its structured approach and systematically mitigates the risks associated with transformational innovation.

Guest post by Sridhar DP