Book Review: Making Breakthrough Innovation Happpen

Book: Making Breakthrough Innovation Happen
Publisher: Harper Collins
Author: Porus Munshi

Porus Munshi's Making Breakthrough Innovation Happen will provide some hope for India's next phase of growth. This book is compilation of 'India Shinning' –type entrepreneurship and innovation stories: 11 examples extracted from extensive research by Marico Innovation Foundation and profiled in detail. For far too long, western, Japanese and now Chinese have been stock-in-trade for most academics, journalist and other broadcasters. It's not that Indian examples didn't exist but finding about then was more difficult.

The range of examples is extensive, spanning start-ups such as Aravind Eye Hospital and Su-Kam: Public service such as Trichy Police and Surat City; and technology-led firms like Titan ad Shantha Biotech. These examples have a number of common threads: the feature men, who I dreamt big, took on unreasonable challenges, energised others around them and blended the qualities of Inspirational leader and benevolent dictator.

Shantha Biotech's story illustrates the power of Innovative approach across a project of life cycle; Varaprasad Reddy's passion in empanelling specialist in the us and in India to work for a truly ambitious cause of eleiminating Hep-B, combating naysayers in bureaucracy and bank, and rejecting conventional wisdom in marketing to 'go-direct' through mass vaccination camps were all necessary to keep the torch burning. Similarly, Dainik Bhaskar example describes a radical approach to attacking well-entrenched incumbents. Combining the surveying and selling functions in a large. Well-trained and well-managed team meant that, in each new city. Dainik Bhaskar could immediately reach 200,000+ household with relevant product.

However, in focusing on mindsets and philosophies, the book short-changes distilling the other key aspect of major innovations: hard , focussed, purposeful work of which Peter Drucker wrote in his Disciplines of Innovation. This is an enduring feature of every example, but isn't called out proportionately. In other aspect, the repeated use of tags-'orbit-shifting' being the most favoured- detracts from the stories. Simpler memes will help cause betters.