BNPL is on rapid growth among youth and young consumers in Southeast Asia including Malaysia and Indonesia. The idea of some providers to serve the underbanked or underserved is somewhat misleading. Although economically this segment is quite large, their ability to repay is quite concerning.
Design thinking is a creative problem-solving approach that is human-centric, empathetic, and iterative. If you’re looking to foster innovation in your organization, understanding and implementing design thinking is a must. It paves the way to generate novel ideas, refine existing processes, and create user-friendly products and services.
The primary functions of innovation are to solve problem and value creation. An innovation skill is the ability to do both of the functions – recognize when a problem require solutions and something potentially valuable is happening and then figuring out how to make it works. The first step is to have a good idea. Good ideas come from having a clear, concise and compelling “hunch” about what people want and need.
he corporate ladder. Let’s suppose a guy gets to be a manager and then he decides to move up to being an executive vice president. What happens as he does this? Well, as far as I can tell, something like this usually occurs:
“First Principle thinking” means using the first thoughts that pop into your head when you are asked to solve a problem. It is a very useful tool for getting your brain working on a difficult problem and generating ideas.
Growth comes from within and without. The first step in this process is to identify all the little things that your current operation is unable to handle. The next step is to come up with a way to overcome the obstacles. Implementation of the solutions.
I believe in hard times like now, the government has to be more creative and innovative. The rest of us should also adopt creativity and innovation to manoeuvre this crisis successfully. I fully convinced only with resilience we will be able to overcome any type of crisis.
The pandemic has forced us whether individuals, entrepreneurs and organisations to look at our previous practices and consider the much needed change. We can’t be relying on old thinking and expect new results from this situation. Now is the crucial time and basis for work redesign. It will not come back again – maybe for another 5-10 years.
Supporting local businesses is a no brainer strategy to stir the economy. By buying local, the welfares of traders and producers will improve or able to sustain particularly in trying times like now. Money stays as much as double in the communities when you buy local. Just, simply #belilokal.
We have come to these conclusions that organizations should spend less on building the innovation’s capacity. To make success with innovation initiatives, corporations need to consider the innovation ability —the business model, customer experiences, and the service system— that become the value drivers.
His first patent was an automatic vote recorder for the Massachusetts Legislature. While a brilliant idea in his time, it was never used and sold of at $100 to someone.
My favorite and I think appropriate definition of today’s innovation come from Clayton Christensen, “Innovation is a change in labor, capital, materials and information into products and services of greater value.”
Farid is an established entrepreneur with many successes. An alma mater to Penn State University (Chemical Engineering) and Sekolah Alam Shah (SAS). He founded SimpanKira.com – a beautiful accounting software. This tagline stuck in my head now! Read on my interview with Farid Nor on ICE – Innovation, Change and Entrepreneurship.
Suhaini Kasmuri, fondly known as SK was a former CFO in various companies (local and MNC). He is also a chartered accountant by profession and a member to Malaysia Institute of Accounting (MIA). Recently I managed to catch him to get his view on Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship (ICE). Especially with many organizations venturing and investing in innovation, how does a CFO make sense out of it?
Azreena Azizan is a common name in tech and innovation scene in Malaysia. Currently she is attached to CREST – Collaborative Research in Engineering, Science & Technology. She is heading CREST’s Johor office as Program Director. I am proud and honoured to share her viewpoints on Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship held recently. Here’s the edited excerpt:
We trained hard, we learned to work with each other in the team and we listened to our coach. We know our enemies by studying them so much so we might know more about them than ourselves. We check the field our court location we are playing to adapt during the game play.
A decade ago, I started a cafe business. It closed down within a year. Lessons learned was, start small but how small? I used to work in hotels, starting a cafe was small enough. Our menu was good, ingredients sourced from the right suppliers and the cafe was well equipped. Customer research done, nothing could go wrong. Wronged we were.
The old way of describing innovation is a closed one. Innovation used to be reserved only for the techies, engineers, R&D officers and bosses. What’s the new way? Innovation is open for everyone and anyone who wishes to create new value in the societies. Inspiring?
It seems, the high tech innovation that we brag about all these years requires some human touch eh? Yes we do, if we want to make it work and integrating well for long term. One of the tools that you can use is coaching.
Have you heard of OYO ? It is a start up from Haryana, India. They were valued at USD$5billion in September 2018 and raised USD$1billion in the same year. OYO is a website that runs booking for budget lodging. Check Wikipedia about OYO here.
Purpose of Recharge is to enable the organization to be aware and find some clarity there’s something new coming for them. They need to contribute, be part of and develop this new initiatives together. In other words, their participation is crucial. Often in some discussion from my experiences, I found some of this innovation is only circumvented from a particular department or division. What makes matter worse if innovation is deemed “IT – information technology” department.
Today my colleague highlighted to me that our company DT LEADERSHIP FB page messenger recognized as “Very Responsive”. I am proud because it used to be 4-5 hours last year, the year before last 8-10 hours. We were late. Now “Very Responsive”. Why? We made a point to respond fast.
You probably have heard about Innovation and you want to do something about it for your organization. It is like a puzzle that needs solving, but the think is which one you should start first?
It is common in many organizations to have multi-generational challenge. Today’s speed of change force everyone to move out from their comfort zones. Here I wish to share a short case study from an organization uses co-creation as a facilitative tool in building Innovation Culture.
One of the skills that will useful to teach, demonstrate and acquire by future employees and professionals are co-creation skills. From LinkedIn above you could see it being the third important skills. So, what is co-creation skills? What is a co-creator? What are sub-skills needed to be good at it?
Today’s management is all about performance and results. Management can be found in big corporation to government to non-governmental organization to military and self. Management is an organ that sits inside a body and cannot exist on its own.
When was the last time you visited a hospital? Now, was it easy to get a parking spot? Did you walk far to get to the main entrance? Did you find the way to the entrance? Ok, I don’t want to be picky here. In most hospitals, those are the pain points – well it is understood hospitals are big building and it is a life saving space; hence the focus is on the people that need quick responses and medical attention.
The last 15 years the center of the economy has been shifting towards Asia. This trend will continue. In fact it is eminent that the standard of Asia will become the de facto standard of the world. These exciting opportunities pose a big challenge for Asian because we will need to have global business skills to be able to serve both domestic and international markets. We need unique and high quality leaders to make better choices to respond more rapidly to change. We need effective leaders.
There’s little we hear today about Marketing Department (or Division) these days? Don’t we? What we hear about Marketing today is about launching events after events. The department role has become launching organizers. They are very good at dealing with event coordinators, medias and gifts companies. Is that what Marketing department supposed to do?
"Part of the goals when we try to design is more social experience."
Content creation in VR & AR will definitely change the way businesses engaging their customers.
In Malaysia, there’s so much talk about going green and use of renewable energy (RE) more to meet our electricity and power needs – be it for households, business offices and factories. The most common RE is solar. Other popular RE are wind, biogas, biomass and thermal, hydro – mostly used in large scale operations like plantation and factories.
"When the winning strategy is not yet clear in the initial stages of a new business, good money from investors needs to be patient for growth but impatient for profits."
Interesting article about an investment company (private equity firm) that acquire food businesses (Heinz & Kraft Foods) back in 2013 and 2015 respectively. The firm believed these two companies could unlock more values by using ruthless focus on efficiency. They quickly employed radical cost cutting programs.
I was waiting for my laptop to boot, somehow it takes longer today than any other day. I then turn and flip some magazines – found a company called Climeworks. They were listed as one of the innovators in climate action business. Pretty cool! Actually their climate solution is focusing on decarbon the air. They call it “Active Air Capture”.
Corporate innovation is an important feature in large organizations. I wouldn’t suggest it to be a corporate function or division or department as it will create another layer or compartment; bureaucratic and adds extra cost to the company.
In the most innovative and valuable companies in the world, the CIO is the CEO. For innovation to happen, *top down & mandated* approach has better chance of success. In the meantime, the executive management also marshall the *bottom up* innovation approach by getting people excited about giving ideas, tweak some process and embrace feedback culture.
Some months ago I ran a short survey on Professional Growth and Development. It was a “lazy” survey where I just published it without much promotion. I wish to only have respondents that are interested to answer the survey. I gave small token in discount vouchers but the desire and “giving back mindset” by the respondents were amazing. They answered because they wanted to share their thoughts. Big hand to them. Running for 1 month, the survey gathered 130 respondents.
Innovation is a tricky business. It is tricky because you are NOT going to get it right the first time. Yes, it upsets a lot of people in the quality and production departments. It boils the blood of the financial controllers and accountants. Innovation also going to frustrate your marketing department because of the changing consumers mind. Typical change management framework and processes might have to change, as well.
My recent work with top talent was very interesting. They are mid level managers from several organizations. Some were grouped together and another dispersed in their own role while going through the program with me.
Leadership is today’s buzz word akin to management in the 1980’s. You probably have been asked at least once, “Are you a leader or manager?”. Of course the right answer is “leader” because it is incumbent that all of us must be one, at least to be relevant in today’s organization. But how to become great leader?
At this stage, my team and I discuss the broad view of the Why, What, When, Who, Where and How about this partnership proposal. Since this partner is an international partner, we are very serious in making sure we put all things on the table. I found getting all team members to Check-in help to uncover their emotional state during that discussion.
The more i talk about it to more people, the more profound the rules become. I get more evidence that the rules work the way it is supposed to work and it validated what i always believe.
Drucker mentioned a very important observation in his book Innovation & Entrepreneurship. He said when there’s a significant shift in demographic but more importantly meaning to something, there’ll be a big move.
You must be logged in to post a comment.