Innovation and Commercialization

Recently in one of the classroom sessions, we had a wonderful discussion on innovation vs. commercialization of technology. By its virtue of being an MBA classroom, it's more than obvious which one of the two was called to be more important than the other, hence no points in guessing it. The interesting parts were the aspects of commercialization that we came to know during the enriching discussion in the classroom. At the end of the discussion our take away from the session was that innovation without commercialization is like a diamond in a coal mine - hidden beneath the black coal with good intrinsic value but much more potential value. Once the diamond is dug out, polished and put in the market, it’s worth much more than the intrinsic value. In this small piece of writing I would throw some light on the aspects of commercialization that makes it possible.

By innovation we mean a new product satisfying the needs of people not yet being satisfied by any other existing products in the market. Now this is not an easy task and, by its very nature, takes huge amount of time, money and effort. In fact there are hundreds and thousands of such attempts going parallel in and around the world by many people. The total dollar bill incurred by companies indulging in such research activities sometimes runs into millions. But only a very small percentage of such research initiatives result into a successful end product. Once the innovation fructifies and the end result is successful, commercialization is the only way to recover all the investments made during the initial R&D phase. A company may not be ready to invest in any innovation if they are unsure about recovery of their initial expenditure. Commercialization thus works as a booster to innovation.

During production, money needs to be spent in the form of operating expense. The production cost might be exorbitantly high, resulting in high market price, keeping consumers stay away from buying it. Adequate commercialization and higher penetration of the product makes it possible to gain economies of scale thus reducing the price and making the product more affordable to masses. Electricity and Mobile charges in India are prefect examples of diminishing cost of production due to economies of scale.

Innovation is a continuous process. Innovation in a product never ends with a single breakthrough. But for a product to evolve through continuous innovation, it is very important to put it in the hands of the consumers. Unless more and more people use it, give their feedback and suggest ways to improve the product, it may not realise its full potential in catering to the needs of the people. Look at the evolution of mobile operating system Android from Google. Because of it being open source and the freedom for consumers to add newer features to it, today's Android is much better than its initial version. This has been made possible by nothing but commercialization of Android OS.

Then there are unexpected benefits to the product from other products and vice-versa, due to commercialization and larger availability of the product to the masses. When two groups of scientists working separately on two completely different products joined hands together, the camera pill was invented. This pill made it possible for doctors to see through the entire length of the small intestine, notwithstanding its convoluted and complex structure inside the body. This became successful only when two separate groups - one working on Missile technology and the other on medical technology - came together. History is replete with such examples where a technology was benefited due to the fact that other one came out of closet and made itself available to the people at large. Had there been no commercialization of one, the world would never have been benefited by the synergy of the combined product, which many a times is much more valuable that either of them used separately.

As a conclusion I would like to state that innovators and scientists are important for the society, but at the same time we cannot ignore the importance of marketers who commercialise the innovation and help it realise its full potential as a much higher carat diamond.

Truth of Pakistan from the mouth of a Pakistani

Today I came across a link on Youtube. It is a news report shown on a pakistani channel about Pakistan itself. Quite extensive and an eye opener for all Pakistanis. Watch it till the end to see how they have gradually started realizing the deep-shit they have dug themselves into.

Horror Story while Traveling with Indian Railways.

The other day when I was traveling from my Jamshedpur to New Delhi, I went through a very bad experience with Indian Railways. The train was scheduled to arrive at the Jamshedpur Stattion at 11:15 PM. Accordingly I was there at around 9:30 PM. The train, Orrisa Sampark Kranti, starts from BBSR and is considered to be a good train, Sampark Kranti that is. But when I enquired about its arrival in Jamshedpur, to my horror it was running 7 hrs late and was expected to reach Jamshedpur at 6:15 in the morning. The point worth mentioning is that it was 9:00 o'clock in the night and the train was going to come the next day morning. Hence any one who was to board that train had to wait the entire night. I was aghast to hear this. Since I had come to Jamshedpur from another town and I had no other place to stay at Jamshedpur, I was only left with the option of spending my night in the waiting room. Thankfully the AC in the waiting room was working and I could somehow manage to get through the night before taking the train to Delhi the next morning.

But I did not know that the horror story was not over and had just begun. When I enquired about the train running so late from the attendents in the train, I came to know that this was very common for this train and it was actually early on that day. Because of the problems posed by Maoists in WB and Jharkhand border area, trains are not run during the night. Agreed, after all living is more important that reaching your destination in time. But then once the train has crossed that dangerous zone, it is expected that it would run properly and would try to take the travellers to their destination in an appropriate duration of time. But here I was ! Sitting in the train, which seemed to be the most ignored train of the route. It stopped at every Tom Dick and Harry station and was crossed by every possible passanger and freight trains, though the scheduled stops were Kanpur and then Delhi!

This condition is acceptable if the train is delayed due to the unavoidable problems like Maoists etc, but what was the logic behind delaying it when everything was perfectly alright for it to run ? It was quite frustrating to see that we were stopped at enumerable number of stations during the journey from Jamshedpur to New delhi resulting in a delay of more than 12 hours of our arrival at Delhi. Due to this I had to suffer some major losses in terms of my work on that day. I am sure there would be many more people in the same train having the same fate as that of mine. All of them would have missed important work they might have, some of them might have missed their flight for onward journey etc.

Now I would like to know who is going to compensate the losses people sufferred due to callous attitude of railways ? Isn't there any accountability from the Railways on this ? Is it so that the time of passengers sitting in the train has no importance at all ? Are they completely on the mercy of Railways once they get into a train ? Is there any provision for such things ? Can we ask for any compensation from the Railways for this ?