MANTHAN - Innovating the Future

In the Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie asks "How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Can men fly?"

The Santa Fe Institute describes novelty in biological, social, and technological systems as the feature that provides the variety on which evolutionary processes act. But how does newness— both advantageous and unsuccessful — arise in the first place, and how does it define the surprisingly common evolutionary processes in these seemingly disparate realms?

Imagining the future requires intense planning. In today’s world we need to link and intertwine heterogeneous systems, make them interoperable, aggregate data and provide pertinent information at the right time and the right place with flexibility and ease of use. Systems like Cloud Computing, Big Data and Analytics, AI and ML, Digital Thread and Digital Twin, and AR/VR/XR are already being used in all new architectures, and technologies like Distributed Ledger using Blockchain are showing a lot of promise.

In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo states that progress is the mode for mankind. Progress is building on the happened, we need the wisdom of the past to create a better tomorrow. Isaac Newton postulated that the reason why we can see far today is because we stand on the shoulder of giants. Don Henley of the Eagles in his interview by Billy Joel reiterated on the same about music by saying “We are all standing on the shoulders of somebody and we need to know who those people are“. But as Bob Iger rightly points out “You can’t allow tradition to get in the way of innovation. There’s a need to respect the past, but it’s a mistake to revere your past.”

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” was Henry Ford’s famous quote on his reason of disrupting the then mode for domestic ground transportation using horse carriages. In today’s world, although it is very important to put customer first and go thru the process of assessing their wants and usage, disruption requires thinking out of the box for products and services that aim to surprise and delight them, have them anticipatory, craving for the next new totally different experience.

It is the collective action of individuals within a specific field or enterprise that creates innovations and commercial successes. Product Innovation, its physical realization and its virtual incarnations – all things managed and represented in Research, Product development, Manufacturing and Marketing & Sell, and everything in between are a judicious mélange of Art, Science & Mathematics, Engineering and Technology, and the right degree of appropriateness is needed from all the fields to define, design, build, govern and implement the metamorphosis that the enterprises and their solutions undergo in their progression.

Defining the future in this new paradigm requires looking beyond artifact creation and invention, to engineering systems that are nimble, flexible and adaptable to the changing needs of the customer and the world. They should keep in step with the progression of technology, our new understanding of the universe we live in and our self-introspection of who we are. It should also account for all our inalienable rights, be mindful of our place in history, of our position amongst the living and the particles that constitute our being.

Our Design Philosophy MANTHAN will provide the basis for the Art of the Possible by incorporating new technology, material composites, parametric and generative design techniques combined with a collaborative and agile methodology for doing. It will draw on natural sciences, intellectual history and 21st century technology to identify environments conductive to innovation by facilitating brainstorming of solutions. It will build a connected ecosystem of people, processes and platforms that enables collaboration, co-creation and ideation. Thus, the process to make, manage, move and maintain will be themed and pragmatic to build smart and connected solutions of the future.

As we seek quantifiable parallels across these diverse systems, we ask: where does novelty come from? What are the factors and the processes that come together to create innovations??The word?MANTHAN literally means "churning", and other meanings may be deep contemplation, churning of facts, analysis aimed at a solution or conclusion. In our context we will refer to it as a new way of brain storming melding Strategic Intent with Story Telling, Design Thinking and Systems Engineering. We will use the tenets of hard tech to enable designing future products and services in conjunction with building an ecosystem to make it happen.

Amidst the skewed distribution and use of people, process and technology in today's world, MANTHAN proposes a direction to shift this imbalance towards people by bringing them in as process boundaries and appropriate use of tools to reduce technical debt using customer insight and feedback loops to align with human-need, desires and aspirations.

Stay tuned for more...

To achieve this goal, we will be assembling a compelling team, accepting strategic investment, building vendor and industry partnerships to create a portfolio of products and services that is not solely driven by standard measurable KPIs but also by empathy, usability, sensibility, passion and purpose. Our ambition is to leave a lasting impact on people by creating ROIs that are immeasurable yet invaluable considerations to justify our existence and progression as a company.

Founded in Chicago, IL in 2021, NUMO is a company whose vision is to utilize intelligent techniques to build smart, connected and sustainable products by pushing the edges of engineering, technology, data management, AI and cybernetics. We start our journey @mHUB in the heart of Chicago, a place that makes innovation and hard tech happen - where start-ups collaborate with experts, schools and investors to bring to focus smart engineering in the new paradigm for a forever connected world.

References:

1. The Three Tenets of NUMO
2. Pivoting to Industry 5.0
3. Modern Bauhaus

For more information, please contact:

NI+IN UCHIL, Founder & CEO