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  • Entrepreneur’s Interview – Dumadu Games

    Sachi: Welcome Narasimha Reddy, founder – Dumadu Games to the interview. Dumadu is nearly a year old company operating in the space of gaming across various platforms.
    Narasimha, It would be great to begin the interview with a brief background about yourself and then let us know how the company and how has grown this far.
    Narasimha: Thank you, I am Narasimha, I completed my engineering in 2003, and began my career in Tata Elexi. Then I joined EFI, worked two years before starting my own company. I worked along with a partner setting up the company for three year and then began this company called Dumadu. Dumadu is into computer gaming.
    Sachi: Dumadu is an year old company right! How did you envision the idea of Dumadu as gaming company? Why did you start it off? How did the idea strike you?
    Narasimha: While with working on iPhone, we realized that it is the best platform for the gaming, so we felt that mobile gaming is going to boom, that how we started a gaming company separately – That how Dumadu started.
    Sachi: When you started off Dumadu you are looking at two fold challenge I understand.
    • One, mobile application development on mobile was just about maturing
    • Two, the gaming industry in India was primarily flooded with flash games – mobiles gaming wasn’t really a great industry to get into.
    Could you highlight the challenges you faced in when you began?
    Narasimha : The biggest challenge was the lack of experienced resources. When I looked for game developers with more than three to four years of experience, I couldn’t find many people. There were very few developers mostly on desktop gaming and not on mobiles. So that is the big challenge.
    We solved this problem by, recruiting freshers, training them and placing them as developers in our company.
    The current challenge that we face is – finding people who can conceptualize the game. In this case too, we are selecting freshers, training them and getting them to prepare specifications and develop games.
    These are the biggest challenges we had.
    Sachi: Since you began recruiting freshers and training them, the training costs would be pretty high. Is this just the case since you are one of the early entrants into the field in India or is it the way the industry is?
    Narasimha: Yes, there is a cost in training these people; the turnaround time would be long. We cannot expect them to be productive in the first six to seven months. This involves both time and money!
    Sachi: Creating a team for designing the complete game is difficult – it involves elaborate process of game design, create the story board, the characters, etc and then go ahead and implement the game.  Finding good game developers and Designers as you said is a challenge, so how did you go ahead forming the team?
    Narasimha: When we started off, we didn’t begin with big games – we began with casual games. These did not require many specifications etc, as we have gained experience, we are slowly adding in more experienced people and also building bigger games.
    Sachi: You looked at this opportunity in the mobile gaming space, and entered into it. What were the kinds of games that actually on iPhone app-store or Android app store, how has it changed over the last one year?
    Narasimha: The trend changes every six months, in this space changes everything. When we started the trend was towards paid applications, now there are ads in applications, then the trend was towards web service and in-app purchases. The trend we are adopting is more or less the same. Most of the games we are developing have web service, and we are not expecting any revenues from paid applications. Most of our revenues are coming from In-app Purchases and Ads.
    Sachi: Could you elaborate on the way the games have changed, rather than generic applications?
    Narasimha:  Casual games have always remained. In the last six to seven month we have seen lots of companies coming up with social game. Now the trend is more of social games and games with virtual money.
    Sachi: how has the team size grown over the last 6 months of operations?
    Narasimha: When we started the team size was 20, now have reached 80.
    Sachi: A scaling up 4 times in an year, impressive! What were the challenges in terms of people that you faced?
    Narasimha: The biggest challenge is attrition. The market is very good for game developers and India does not have many game developers too, so it is hard to retain people. That’s a big challenge!
    Sachi: Given your growth in number of people and of the kind of products your visibility would have increased. Did you look for any funding to actually scale up?
    Narasimha:  We have been approached by many VCs but we are not willing to take funding now. Probably in another 6 to 7 months when we are organized well. I do not consider my company too well organized. If we are organized in the current way, it would be extremely hard to scale, so when we have organized ourselves better, I would look for funding – I am expecting this to take around 6 months.
    Sachi:  When you have scaled from 20-80 people with the span of nearly one year, you would definitely have some challenges in the kind people you are looking for. What is it that you essentially look for in somebody while being recruited?
    Narasimha: When we recruited a fresher, we look for the aptitude of the candidate, and obviously the attitude. These we feel are extremely important to be looked into.
    Sachi: When you said attitude, what is it that you are looking for?
    Narasimha:  When you say attitude, one must have an interest to learn, should be willing to stick to a company for long time and hard work.
    Sachi:  Could you share with us, the vision you have about the company for its future?
    Narasimha: In the beginning, we struggled for some time for revenues to generate. Even at this stage we looked at doing only products, we didn’t intent to get into services at all. I see the market has been pretty good.
    The second aspect is the development cost – in India the cost is almost 1/4th or 1/5th of what it is in the US.  The place where both of us – the Indian companies and the US companies promote is the same. So it translates to saying that our cost is lesser but the market is the same – So we are able to realize the huge potential in terms of revenue for our products and we would stick to it.
    Sachi: Did you consider a model where in you create a brand name, and market your products. At a later date you could focus on just doing the marketing and branding while outsourcing the development to someone else or even entertaining freelancers approach you?
    Narasimha: No, we are not looking for that model.
    At the moment, the place where we lack is in making good specifications – Specify the game. We are looking for the model where we tie up with a company that do the specifications and we develop the game and market it. We share the revenues with the company. That is the model we are looking at.
    Sachi: It is interesting model where you complement your weakness with someone elses strength and look at a win win situation.
    Given that gaming is such a dynamic field, where do you want to see Dumadu in the next couple of years?
     
    Narasimha: If we look at the number of games published on the app-store, we have published more games than any other company in India. Going forward into the next 2 years, we are looking at creating larger number of social games. We want to change our portfolio to social games from casual games.
    Sachi: Do you have larger vision as to what you want to do with Dumadu Games?
    Narasimha: No, I don’t have any such large vision for Dumadu Games.
    Sachi: What is your message to the aspiring Entrepreneurs?
    Narasimha: Right now the market is too good -especially, when mobile applications are concerned. If one wants to be an entrepreneur, they have lots of opportunity.
    Sachi: Is there any set of dos and donts that you would like to give the entrepreneurs?
    Narasimha: The market is too good and I would welcome more entrepreneurs to this world.
    When you are confident about your capabilities, it’s always better to try.
    When I ask someone why they don’t start a company if they are confident about their idea, they say – they aren’t confident about its success. They constantly think about the financial status.
    If I am confident about my capacities, I should be ready to leave the job and try the venture out – Its always easy to get a job, it is not really that hard. If you have tried for an year and haven’t succeeded, what you lose is one year’s salary. You can get back any time.
    Sachi: When you began your journey as entrepreneur, how difficult or easy was it to convince the people back home?
    Narasimha: I never said anything about my job or company back home, they were thinking that I was still working for nearly two years after having started off. I conveyed I had resigned only after two years after starting off.
    Sachi: Do you think it is a good idea for other people to follow?
    Narasimha: I wasn’t confident that my parent would allow me to do so, so I adopted this approach not sure if it would work for others.
    Sachi: Now that they know you have started off, how is the support at home?
    Narasimha: It been pretty well now.
    Sachi:  Any challenges you personally front with the long working hours? How about the work and life balance that people talk about?
    Narasimha: I wouldn’t say that we require working too hard. It is ok if you work as much as you work for an employer company, it’s perfectly fine. You don’t need to work too hard.
    Sachi: Thank you, for coming on to the interview.

  • Spaghetti Organization – A story of Oticon

    In the last blog, we looked at the Silicon Valley format of organizations and the related organizational learning. In this blog, we look at a unique experiment that was conducted in an organization – Oticon and the resultant term that developed called – Spaghetti Organization
    Spaghetti Organization refers to a flat, loosely coupled, project based organization characterized by ambiguous job boundaries and extensive delegation of task and project responsibilities to autonomous teams. Let’s understand this with the example of Oticon.
    Oticon is a Danish electronics producer operating in the space of hearing aids. It became extensively known for its s radical organizational transformation in the early 1990s. The organization was traditionally hierarchical, functional based organization, and transformed radically into a “Spaghetti Organization”. It was the loss of competitive advantage in the 1980s that forced it to get into implementing this model. The advent of the digital technology had almost spelt doom on this organization. In response to this, this company underwent extensive restructuring in the 1990s – the aim was to have an entrepreneurial and creative organization. This resulted in a series of remarkable innovations in the 1990s. However, this form of organization was abandoned in 1996.
    A research by Foss suggests that the reason could be the severe problems encountered in coordination and knowledge sharing due to a highly fluid and adhocratic nature of the project assignments. Employee’s commitment to the project was also another point to ponder about. Foss also argues that, the form of organization was an “internal hybrid” between elements of market autonomy and flexibility in hierarchy. It was also inherently unstable due to the motivational challenges caused by the selective intervention by the top management into project selection and coordination. The employee frustration seen due to this could have been the cause for eventual retreat of Oticon from the radical and celebrated Spaghetti Organizational model.

  • Understanding Adhocracy and Knowledge creation – Silicon Valley

    In the last blog, we attempted understanding the J-Form of organization better. In today’s blog we look at the Silicon Valley style of organization (closer in alignment with the Adhocracy concept) and see how Adhocracy has been leveraged.
    The Silicon Valley has been a very dynamic and successful region where rapid innovation and commercialization of fast growing technologies. The majority of the industries in this region are microelectronics, semiconductors, computer networking, and biotechnology. These industries are characterized by frequent reconfiguration and realignment of the firms to survive a constantly changing environment spurred by innovation. There is a large pool of professional experts with known reputations in particular fields that enable the firms to quickly reconstitute their knowledge and skill base in the course of their innovative endeavors. There is high mobility of the labor force that enables not just the culture of hiring and firing, in addition when combined with the professional networks this enables rapid transmission of evolving new knowledge, – this might mostly be tacit though!.
    The shared context and industry specific values ensure that the tacit knowledge is not wasted when one shifts form one organization to the other! This inherently encourages the individual to engage actively in this tacit “know-how” that he could leverage for himself. Though regional, this stability is critical to offer the sustaining of collective learning and knowledge creation within and across the firm boundaries.
    Now if we were to generalize this Silicon Valley culture in terms of Adhocracy – it could be seen as an organic and adaptive form of organization that fuses the professional expertise with various knowledge and skills into adhoc project teams for solving complex and typically uncertain problems. Careers of these professionals are structured around a series of discrete projects than a firm level growth. This indicates that the organizational boundaries are pretty permeable and allow for the insertion of new ideas and knowledge from outside – through recruitment of new staff into the firm. 
    The strength of Adhocracy is in being able to reconfigure the knowledge base quickly deal with high technical uncertain problems – this in many ways enable innovation in emerging new industries. They are capable of dynamic learning and radical innovation, however this model is not without its share of challenges – the toughest amongst this is that of knowledge accumulation at an organizational level.

  • Understanding the success of J-Form of Organizations and related organization learning

    In the last blog, we began a discussion on the relation between organizational learning and organization structure. We continue this discussion today to better understand the J-Form of organizational structures.
    In order to really understand the source for success of J-Form of Organizations in innovation and learning, it would be good to begin with the larger economy and drill deeper into an organization.
    Japanese economy is generally characterized by high level of cooperation and organizational integration. There exists extensive long-term collaboration of firms in business groups and networks. The smaller firms are very well integrated with the larger firms.
    The knowledge embedded in organizational routines, team relationships and shared culture are what form the basis of the innovative capacity of the J-Form organizations. The shop-floor skills in problem solving, intensive interaction and knowledge sharing across different functional units create an “organizational community” which drives Learning and Knowledge Creation. New Knowledge is formed the fusion, synthesis and combination of the existing knowledge base. 
    The J-Form of organizations tends to develop an orientation towards incremental innovation as a strategy and generally perform well in relatively mature technology fields characterized by rich possibilities of combinations and incremental improvements to existing products or components. The focus is on nurturing organizationally embedded, tacit knowledge and it emphasizes continuous improvement in such knowledge. This approach however has been found to be not as effective when dealing with radically innovative platforms where the knowledge might have to gain knowledge from external sources. 
    The success of Japanese firms in mature industries like – automobile, electronics etc and it’s not so good performance in areas like software and biotechnology are what we could related to.

  • Relation between Organization Structure and Organizational Learning

    In the last blog we continue the discussion on the challenges that are faced in creating a system for organizational learning. In today’s blog we try to understand the link between organization structure and organizational learning. 
    To understand the relation between structure and organizational learning, it would be extremely useful if we could put the forms of organizational structures on a continuous spectrum. At one end would be Adhocracy (Recollect from this blog the classes of organization by Mintzberg) where we have find the organization structure cutting across the normal structure lines of the organization to exploit the opportunities and solve problem. At the other end one could imagine a very “Japanese Organization” (J Form) where in formal teams etc exists and the learning is more of a cumulative exercise. 
    J-Form of Organization does comprise of organizations that are good at cumulative learning, the innovativeness of these organizations is designed by the organization specific collective competencies and problem solving routines. 
    Adhocracy – relies more on individual expertise organized in flexible market oriented project teams the individual expertise enables the organization to respond quickly to changes in knowledge and skills and integrating new kinds of expertise to generate radical new products and processes.
    Understanding each of these would require a separate blog, so we just initiate the discussion today and would continue it over the next few blogs.

  • Entrepreneur’s Interview – Edu next ventures – A Finishing School business

    Sachi: Good Morning, Swaroop and Vivek, Thanks for coming in for this interview. Swaroop and Vivek are founders of “edu-next ventures”, which operates in the education space. 
     
    I would like to begin the interview with getting to know your background briefly before you could proceed with what edu-next does.
    Swaroop: I am basically from Bangalore. I am a graduate of KREC Suratkal, and then I did my MBA from IIM Bangalore. I then worked with Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) as a consultant for a short while and then I moved to Dell Analytics where I worked in their marketing analytics team. We are now running this venture called Edu-Next which essentially a finishing school for business graduates. We have been working with business schools in India, to provide a careercounseling and mentorship to help students decide better as to what job they would get into and how do they mould themselves to ensure that they get the job.
    Vivek: Hi, this is Vivek and I am a graduate of KREC Suratkal,batch of 2006.
    Sachi:How did the idea of finishing school come to you?
    Vivek: During one of us when brainstorming at IIMB we decided that we would work in the space of education and for obvious reasons we landed at the idea of finishing schools – because it is right at the surface. We wanted to skim the surface first and then see how we can work in the other areas in education.
    In terms of how we came to the idea itself – India being a very competitive environment does not give enough time to people to think about what they want to do in life? or how they move forward? where they want to grow? What they want to do for the rest of their life?
    They are in a hurry and experience enormous peer pressure – thisdrives most career decisions. People do not reflect and think what they done in the past, what they are doing now and what is the personality type, what are their carrier goals, what they can do, what they can’t do, what are the strengths and so on. They approach placement and interviews in a rather unprepared or underprepared fashion. We have also gone experienced similar things.
    Individually for me the dilemma was – MBA or no MBA? Should I stick to my own domain or move to something else?How do I shift?What do I need to make this shift? Where do I shift to?These questions are commonplace –especially once people start working. So we want to address this first at the post graduation level and then move to even more impactful level – under graduate and then Pre-University.
    In an education driven society like ours, it’s very important for people to make the right decisions about where they want to be, so that they can deliver the best and not be unhappy about where they are, or the decisions they made.
    Swaroop: One of the reasons why we got into this space is that I am personally very passionate about education.
    I have also seen a lot of heart burn with my own batch mates in MBA who honestly felt very lost!We took the job we got out of campus. But somehow the ability to say this is what is important for me, this is the kind of person I am and this is what I want to choose is lacking even in the best Institutes – We want to reduce that heart burn.May be say after 5 years of working post MBA, how do you ensure that you are doing the right thing? How do you ensure you are happy?
    Thesearenot easy questions to answer! And each one has his own questions and must find his own answers. We are trying to use different ways to get students to think and make them ask themselves these questions – we provide a platform for them to make the right choice. This was the primary reason we started this venture.
    We alsorealize that sometime it’s too late at the MBA level to take these decisions – Probably they are better off beingmusicians. But that is the question we will answer later. Given that fact that you are doing a MBA, how do we help them to make better choice?
    Sachi: It was pretty clear about how you went about starting it. 
    You are targeting the PG section of the education system, and you also realize that most of the career choices are made at the +2 levels.How are you addressing that at the movement?
    Swaroop: We are not addressing that at the moment, because we need to learn a lot in that space.
    The approach would be slightly different because we still are in a society that promotes engineering because it give a job that pays Rs. 25,000/- or promotes being a doctor. What about being a physicist or mathematician or an artist or a star. While there is increase consciousness that people can have different kinds of career choices, we still are not mature enough to accept some of these things. We have to still figure out a way to address this problem.
    There is a sufficient heart burn in MBA world itself for us to address the problem and establish ourselves as a provider of quality career services or career guidance and then we will work at scaling it to other sections of education.
    Vivek: Primarily post graduation is one venuewhere you are not left with many choices– a PhD or a job. So there are very few things that you can have to choose from after post graduation,and that is where we are saying what choices they have made; learnmore about these people and then probably move to under graduation and others.
    Sachi: What is your vision for Edu-next?
    Swaroop: The first,I really want Edu-next to be a respected name in the space as – providers of quality career servicesand career guidance/ counseling. We have some challenges I would like to address.
    Firstly there is always a distribution in terms of quality of students. Our challenge is to understand this difference in inputs and be able to cater to the difference needs that different kinds of student have. If you take a tier one B-school and comparing with a tier four B-school, the expectations from the course, what is available after the course are so different. We cannot apply the same logic everywhere. So for us able to figure out how to suggest the correct thing for a person is one challenge that I would like to address, and that would go a long way in building our reputation.
    The second thing is we are inherently a very people driven business. The biggest problem is how do you scale something like this? Can you build enough tools and bring in enough technology so that sitting out of one city in India we are able to reach a large population. How do you start adapting to different contexts – I don’t even want to restrict it to India, how do you address somebody in US or Brazil or NewZealand?We want to make it a very large forum for people to come and get this service. That is what I am really looking at from the ‘B’ school angle.As far as rest is concerned it is still work in progress, we will keep you posted.
    Sachi: This question is not directly related to edu-next but would love to ask you – What motivated you to be entrepreneurs?
    Vivek: I will be very candid about this. Soon after Engineering, it is a lot of multi pronged peer pressure that you see. Friends went on to do M.S, went on to do MBA and other things – some studied Mathematics, some stuck to their own domain and completed their masters and somebody else doing PhD and othersstuck to their own job. The people in the job would slog it out from 9 to 5 and go out on weekends – Even I went through the same things straight of college. We worked hard and but still like everybody else who has hungry to do more, especially from a college like ours. We had to do something more to satisfy – Probably do much more than what we are doing at present.
    MBA? M.S? I asked all these questions to myself and I could not answer most of them well – after a post graduation what next?And given the personal choices that I have made such as where I want to stay, what I want to do and amongst other things, it was not an easy decision to make. Entrepreneurship was also a buzz word during an early 2000, and is even now. We just dabbled with few things – trying to do that, trying to do this. It was more experimental, not knowing where the journey will go.
    Being a first generation entrepreneur, it is not very easy to push yourselfto quit your job or do something of your own. Soon I started enjoying the process and not knowing where I to go, itself was fun. You can push yourself that much harder in not in terms of effort but in terms of how much we can take? How many things you can give up?
    You generally compare yourself with peers who after MBA buying cars left right and center, Going to the Dalal Street and getting their pay packages. You are still stuck between a Volvo bus and a BMTC normal bus or even an auto rickshaw because you cannot afford to.So this is a hard decision to make. But that is what probably is the right choice! You know once you have made the right choice.I think you will have to experiment a little, not everyone is sure what they want to do unless they try different things. So I started doing whatever I have to do being my own.
    Swaroop: I am a crazy control freak!  I cannot work for any one. Money is an obvious issue, we will all make money eventually. A very close friend of mine says “we will all die rich”. I have immense faith in his statement. So money is a motivator, as is the immense wealth to be created as part of running your own business but I think the greatest kick is that “I decide what happens to my company, my fortunes”. That is the primary reason why I started off on my own. Opportunity wiseI didn’t have any problem; I could have gotten any job I wanted but that wasn’t what I was looking for.
    Sachi: In your journey of entrepreneurship, what are the learning that you havethis far?
    Vivek: I would like to keep it extremely crisp– In terms of the learning, know what you are trying to do, have the right people with you, stay in touch with all your friends especially entrepreneurs who have taken the off-beat route, because they are the one who can talk with and probably you can relate to. It is extremely important to prioritize as an entrepreneur.
    Swaroop: It is ok to not know really where you are headed to and you will figure out along the way. The most important thing is to ensure that working with people who are right for you. There are certain kind of people whom you can work with and certain kind of people you cannot!From personal experience I can tell you that it is very important to choose your team right. It is a good team that can pull off anything.
    The other thing is you have to build good will along the way. It is very difficult especially when you have graduated from a top tier Institute.You tend to come with this baggage of entitlement, I am from here, and I have to be given this. Very quickly I have learnt that unless you have something of value and you can prove it, nobody is going to give a damn that you are from certain Institute, or you have gotten a certain degree. It’s humbling in that sense and I am better off now. I am very happy I got rid of my excess baggage that all good institutes put on to you when you graduate and that’s been the best learning so far.
    Sachi: What is your message for aspiring entrepreneur?
     
    Swaroop: Like they say, the fastest way to solve a problem is right through it.Unless you get in, you are never going to solve the problem.I know lot of people who sit at the dinner table and say, I have got this brilliant idea, I have got the excel sheets, I have got the ppt, I know the VC and all that – but you just frustrate yourself out! Sitting with all the plans and complaining about how corporate life is not or you.
    But If you are not goingto jump in and do it, it’s not going to happen. You have to have reasonable plans etc all that jazz would be there,but the tipping point is to say, I am going to get out tomorrow, I am going do this for a while and make sure it works.
    We have tried this part time and it doesn’t really work.We have to do it full time and give it what is due. And at least I realize, the faster you get in, the easier it is – because, as you get older, fatter and slower and richer, entrepreneurship becomes more and more difficult. It is like trek to Manasa sorovar. It is best done when you are fifteen. We could possibly do it only by 30. Anything later you might succumb to heart attack, so do it quickly.
     Vivek: I have two things,
    One – If you have worked in a corporate set up before, and learnt to de-jargonize. Big organizations jargonize to prove their worth! Keep it simple.
    Second- Do not fall into the trap of theory of entrepreneurship. If you have a good idea and you think you can pull it off and if you can prove to yourself that you can do it – Forget the scaling, forget everything else. I mean, how would it grow? Will it become a billion dollars business? All such similar questions – probably a hundred of them. The first starting point is you need to be convinced about the idea itself. These points might have been studied, but don’t go by the book at times, do it yourself. It is ok to go off the book that you can always come back and join later on.
    Sachi: Thank you Swaroop and Vivek for this wonderful interview.

  • Challenges in creating a system for organizational learning

    In the last blog, we looked at some of the definitions in the context of organizational knowledge creation. In today’s blog we begin understanding the challenge of how the organization would have to balance the system when creating a process for organizational learning.
    Organizational learning requires the organization to keep a sufficiently porous boundary that would allow the “flow” of new knowledge and ideas into the organization yet keep a strict internal focus for building on its current expertise. The fundamental issues for the organization at this point is that through existing processes they have a completely certain environment to explore, while the future for the organization lies only in exploring the new possibilities beyond what has been established already.
    If one is to ask why the organization should allow external ideas into the current organizational learning, well here is an answer – Knowledge creation is a product of organization’s capability to recombine existing knowledge and generate new applications from this existing base. However, radically new learning tends to arise from contacts outside the organization. These external contacts could be in the form of business alliances, network relationships, as well as new personnel into the company. 
    To sustain in the long run, organizations would have to “creatively destruct” that would allow them develop firm-specific capability and renew or reconfigure its competencies to address environmental challenges. This balance between exploitation of certainty and exploration of the future is a continuous challenge that requires a very good balance and coordination to be successful for the organization.

  • Organizational Knowledge, Routines and Core Competency

    In the last blog we looked at concept of “context” in organizational knowledge creation. In today’s blog we continue understanding these terms and also learn a few new terms in the process.
    It is always good to understand and look at an organization as a cognitive enterprise that learns and develops knowledge. In this direction there are some interesting terms that have been coined by management theorists. Understanding these is quite intuitive:
    Organizational Knowledge: This term refers to the shared cognitive schemes and distributed common understanding within the firm that facilitate knowledge sharing and transfer
    Organization Routines: A kind of collective knowledge rooted in shared norms and belief that aids joint problem solving and capable of supporting complex pattern of action in the absence of written rules
    Core Competency: Implies that learning and knowledge creation activities of a firm tend to be cumulative and path dependent.
    While all these talk about how organizations are learning environment, it is also true that in some cases, the same earning could be difficult to unlearn past practices and explore alternative ways of doing things – this many a times leads to what some management experts call as “competency trap”.
    At this point again it would be interesting to reiterate the importance of decision making in management. There is an inherent difficulty when organizations try to learn – to draw the boundary between external and internal knowledge flows is extremely crucial. We shall continue to discuss this in the next blog and it is pretty interesting to understand this.

  • Designing the right context for organizational knowledge creation

    In the last blog we began understanding the concept of organizational innovation pretty closely – it also involved a very good commentary from one of our readers which enables us gain a significant insight into the way organizations foster innovation. In today’s blog, we look at the “context” of knowledge creation, how this functions and in the next blog, we look at what are the essential ingredients that would have to be taken note of to get this context to be working for an organization.
    In this blog we significantly refer to one – Nonaka – a management theorist who has done some significant work in the area of organizational knowledge creation. It is important to acknowledge that “tacit” knowledge is the origin of all human knowledge, and organizational knowledge creation essentially the process of mobilizing individual tacit knowledge and fostering its interaction to the explicit knowledge base of the firm.
    Nonaka, also illustrates the importance of a context for knowledge creation called “Ba”, this context provides the shared social and mental space for the Interpretation of Information, interaction and emerging relationships that serve as a foundation of knowledge creation.
    “Ba” is very similar to another concept “community of practice” that suggests that organizational members construct their shared identities and perspectives through “practice” that is shared work experience. This practice enables the sharing of practices and cognitive repertoires to facilitate knowledge sharing and transfer. 
    Hence a group placed at the intersection of the vertical and horizontal flow of knowledge within an organization, serves as the bridge between the individual and organization in the knowledge creation process. Thus even a semi-autonomous project team play an extremely crucial role in knowledge creation. 

  • Understanding Organizational Innovation

    In the last blog we defined the terms – Innovation and Cognition. In today’s blog we begin looking at organizational innovation in the context of Knowledge Creation.
    Innovation is a learning process by which new knowledge is created to solve the new problems that are defined. The core concept of study in all theories of Organizational Learning and knowledge creation is that of how organizations translate individual insights and knowledge into collective knowledge and organizational capability.
    Such collective knowledge could be the accumulated knowledge of the organization stored in its rules, procedures, routines and shared norms which guide the problem solving activities and patterns of interaction among its members. It resembles the “collective mind” or “memory” of the organization, it could also be the hard data that is “static” or could be “flowing” in the interactions. It exists between the individuals of the organization, rather than within them. 
    In some cases it could be more than the sum of the individual’s knowledge and in others it could be less than the sum, it’s a matter of how the mechanisms to translate the individual knowledge to collective knowledge are designed. Both Individuals and Organizations are learning entity and it is important to understand that any learning takes place in a social context and this is what makes every learning outcome different.