Unlocking Human Ingenuity to drive outcomes

“Necessity may be the mother of invention, but ingenuity is the bombshell of success.” While author Phillip Gary Smith captured the consequences of ingenuity, the recent COVID-19 pandemic and related events became the backdrop for a range of ingenious responses by businesses, institutions, and even governments.

A few Michelin-starred restaurants started doing home deliveries or selling cook-at-home meal kits. The historically in-person healthcare services moved to telehealth virtually overnight. Certain hospitals deployed robots to monitor the vitals of COVID-19 patients. Many manufacturers redeployed their facilities and know-how for accelerated production of sanitizers, ventilators, and PPE kits. Some governments repurposed drone technology for transporting COVID tests and vaccines. Most corporates and institutions reimagined their operations into remote working environments through technology adoption at never-seen-before speeds.

Whether it was an opportunity to score over the competition, a response to a crisis, or even simply a means of staying afloat during this predicament, human ingenuity was unlocked and channeled in inspiring ways across sectors, geographies, and businesses during the pandemic.

However, ingenious solutions are not born out of catastrophes alone. More often than not, they originate when businesses are willing to reimagine themselves and spot opportunities to make a difference: ???

ü?By repurposing something that already exists

ü?By identifying unaddressed problems

ü?By integrating existing products or services to address a new need or create a novel outcome.

Ingenuity in Business Models

Developing a new business model is a classic case of ingenuity. Take Amazon for example. Not only did it establish and enter a new market, but it did so with minimal resources, with the founder working out of his garage, and re-configuring the consumer-supplier relationships. Similarly, look at YouTube, a “smart” model that spends nothing on creating content, when compared to Netflix, a “hardworking” traditional model that spends about $20 billion each year on content creation alone. Another trend in ingenious business solutions is that of freemium models. This is where businesses give away certain basic services for “free” for creating a foundation for future transactions which would be in the form of “premiums” for supplemental or advanced features. You will find success stories in numerous applications, including gaming (Candy Crush), music (Spotify), workouts (FitOn), communication (skype), storage (Dropbox), and more.

But remember, ingenious business solutions don’t mean driving technology adoption or digitization alone. Often, technology is only an enabler and not a strategy. The technology could be the “how’ that keeps evolving, but the “what” of any business usually remains constant.

Ingenuity in Business Propositions

There are many occasions when ingenuity is born out of constraints. Whether it is time, structural, or resource constraints, businesses that strip away the extraneous, focus on what’s important, and articulate clearly what they stand for can reframe the problems and bypass the constraints. For example, look at OYO. A hotel aggregator business that started as a single hotel service in India in 2013 had expanded operations to more than 800 cities in over 80 countries by 2020 simply by shifting focus from room prices and availability to the actual user experience. OYO quickly changed gears from leasing and selling hotel rooms on its platform to a franchise model, where they partner with hotels, renovate them to meet their checklist of services, and make them a part of their ‘standardized budget hotel chain’.

Ingenuity in Organizations: In this context, ingenuity would be the ability to create innovative solutions using limited resources and imaginative problem solving, while still operating within the broader business framework and structures. We don’t have to be ground-breaking scientists to put human ingenuity to practice. Some of the most creative and profitable solutions emerge from the innovative use of already existing tools or resources. As leaders in our business, we may just have to play our part in providing the frameworks that support, recognize, and truly unlock ingenuous solutions.

At Practus, some of the ways we are trying to do this are:

·?Sending clear signals that we value experimentation and are open to reimagining our business model

·?Breaking down our silos, making our operations more fluid, and refocusing our energies on delivering customer delight

·?Looking beyond our four walls, proactively building new networks and collaborations (both formal and informal), and energizing our structures to quicken the flow of innovative ideas. Remember, Bezos, not only rewrote the rules of the game but also knew how to inspire people by talking about what he was doing, getting them excited about coming on board.

For successful organizations, innovation is a “choice” that is “substantial” and backed by a “commitment of deliberate action”. This means we need to think about not just creativity, but also about net new growth that is repeatable, substantial, and sustainable. Whether it is new products, customers, business models, or markets, any ingenious business solution should be able to increase value and drive growth.

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