Its been a very very long time for me to write a post on my blog. Yeah, I admit. Call me lazy to write on my blog post or think of it as a lack of anything interesting happening around that prompted me to keep off the blog.
Anyhow, today was a good day at work for me. We had the final of Aviskhar-2010, an innovator’s festival. Essentially it was a competition of innovative ideas that can help the business to either get more business, save costs or increase customer satisfaction. In last few months, we did have few rounds of initial discussions and screenings and today’ finally about 14 teams competed with each other for the top 3 prizes. The set up was far from conventional where people go on dias and present their idea one by one and a panel of judges vote to rate the best idea. The competition was more of an open competition where each of the competitor were given a stall with two desktops PCs, laptop & a network connection. You were supposed to create your own marketing material, decorate the stall and entertain the people coming to visit your stall by marketing your own product. People will come and visit the stall, talk to you about your idea, ask questions and if they are satisfied, will go to the voting booth and vote for their favourite idea.
It was pretty interesting for me to stand in a stall and talk to hundreds of unknown people, few knowing what you are talking about, some knowing nothing about your idea. Few were veterans in the company, while few were absolutely new joiners. This kind of experience was new to me at work where I had to act as a sales agent and sell the idea to unknown people and get them buy into your concept and make them actually vote for you.
My innovative ideas was about reducing the overall operational, infrastructure costs of production monitoring systems while keeping the operational efficiencies in tact. We projected to save about 80% savings on infrastructure requirements and about 30% saving on the human efforts. The visitors included almost all kind of employees right from India Head to new joiners, all showing keen interest in hearing what we wanted to say. Few got convinced and did managed to vote for us.
I had to talk continuously to over 400+ different people about the idea, talking them through understanding the concept and urging them to vote for us. Looks we could convince only 306 of them.
Although, it was sufficient for me to win IIIrd prize at the contest.
You will see the actual tag on the right hand side bar at the bottom. The software is really good but remains to be seen what you can use it for really. 