E- Revolution 2011: Innovate and Integrate

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The second session of the day 2, of the two day mega ICT event,
e-Revolution 2011, was an open house discussion which had speakers
likes Professor Parikshit Bansal, head IPR cell, NIPER; Pawan Kumar
Goyal, managing director, Chemical Resources; Dr. Daya Gaur, head of
the department, computer science & engineering and faculty
incharge, Entrepreneurship cell, IIT Ropar; Serbjit Kukreja, founder,
Micromation; and Saugat Sen, vice president, Cadence Design Systems
India. Kunwar Sachdev, managing director, Su-Kam Power Systems was the
key note speaker and Alok Ramsisaria, PanIIT Chandigarh chapter was the
moderator of the session.



The session started with a quote from Alok Ramsisaria, “If
you are solving the yesterday’s problem with
today’s tool, then you will not be in business
tomorrow.” On this note, Kunwar Sachdeva showed an array of
his successful and failed innovations – technological and
marketing, and motivated the young entrepreneurs to innovate as per the
need of the customers. He acknowledged the fact that innovation is
possible is every area provided it is fuelled with passion.



Growth through innovation has been slow and painful in Chandigarh but
eventually worth doing, said Serbjit Kukreja, who had decided to stay
in a small city instead of going to metros to survive and satisfy his
need and entrepreneurial potential respectively. He highlighted that
challenges in small cities are unique so solution through innovation is
the only option as one has to stretch the abilities of local available
population.



Another important issue of SME – patenting of SMEs was duly
acknowledged by Parikshit Bansal, who wears many hats –
teacher, biochemist, patent consultant, entrepreneur and a lawyer. He
advised all the pharmaceutical SMEs and budding entrepreneurs to use IT
to take competency to a bigger level as it has a potential to bring
down cost of pharma/ bio-medical equipment.



One very important query which Saugat Sen addressed of the SMEs how to
attract talent in R&D. He cited the fact that most of the large
organizations’ R&D departments even do not do more
than one-third of actual or basic innovation as it is very difficult to
convince top management owing to profit priority. Immediacy of
performance is a very big problem with large organizations. So, there
lies huge scope for SMEs to occupy that space. Therefore, young SMEs
should first develop core competency and then integrate with other
teams and competencies.



Dr. Daya Gaur threw light on the basics of innovation that innovations
means different things to different people. Innovation means process of
value addition but a successful entrepreneur is able to convert that
value into profit.



The enriching session concluded that an innovation can fail but the
spirit of an entrepreneur should not fail.