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123 results

Factories Without Formulas

Factories Without Formulas

India is investing billions in battery manufacturing. But without the capital to fund indigenous technology, the intelligence inside those factories may continue to be imported.

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Bharti Krishnan
MJ
Mridu Jhangiani

Bharti Krishnan & Mridu Jhangiani

From Bazaar to Breakthrough
·Product & Innovation

From Bazaar to Breakthrough

The next phase of global innovation may emerge not from invention, but from how India adapts and stretches existing tools.

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Shrinath V

Shrinath V

Founder, The Salient Advisory | Product & AI Strategy Advisor

The risk taker
·Founder Journeys

The risk taker

What makes Elon Musk tick? Insights from the biography by Walter Isaacson

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D Shivakumar

D Shivakumar

Operating Partner | Advent International

From employee to entrepreneur
·Founder Journeys

From employee to entrepreneur

A message to young graduates: Don’t ignore regular salaried employment. It can gain you valuable business experience and serve as a springboard to an entrepreneurial career

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S. Ramakrishna (Rama) Velamuri

S. Ramakrishna (Rama) Velamuri

Strategic Growth & Innovation Expert | Visiting Professor

The Middle India consumer
·Founder Journeys

The Middle India consumer

Middle India has low trust for a new interface. Here’s how Razorpay, Smartstaff, Meesho, Dehaat and Krazybee are investing in gaining trust. An extract from ‘Winning Middle India: The Story of India’s New-Age Entrepreneurs’, by Bala Srinivasa and T.N. Hari

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

The Contrarian
·Founder Journeys

The Contrarian

Sridhar Vembu built Zoho by questioning the conventional wisdom. For the longest time, no one took much notice. But now people are curious about what makes him—and Zoho—tick

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N S Ramnath

N S Ramnath

Senior Editor | Founding Fuel

How Sugar Cosmetics found its sweet spot
·Founder Journeys

How Sugar Cosmetics found its sweet spot

Vineeta Singh, CEO of Sugar Cosmetics, talks about turning fears into wins, taking an unconventional approach to succeed in a David & Goliath scenario, and building resilience from unexpected sources

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

An edtech entrepreneur’s learning journey
·Founder Journeys

An edtech entrepreneur’s learning journey

Parul Gupta, co-founder and president of Springboard, talks about how to build a trusted education brand, cultivate a growth mindset and unlock the big opportunities that lie ahead in edtech

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Aparajita (Opu) Bhattacharyya

Aparajita (Opu) Bhattacharyya

Product Strategy & Monetization | Microsoft Azure, Seattle

FF Daily #459: Why show not tell matters
·Founder Journeys

FF Daily #459: Why show not tell matters

August 26, 2021: Unbundling market infra & market governance; How Taliban used tech; Road signs for a polarized world

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

FF Daily #453: The phases of disruption
·Founder Journeys

FF Daily #453: The phases of disruption

August 19, 2021: How balloon angioplasty proved to be a disruptive technology; The difficulty of interpreting data; How Amazon wins; Star Wars explained

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

FF Daily #416: Practical innovation
·Product & Innovation

FF Daily #416: Practical innovation

July 6, 2021: Innovate to solve immediate and consequential problems; Vaccine hesitancy; The space race; Thinking time

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

An Indian beauty upstart in the West
·Founder Journeys

An Indian beauty upstart in the West

A new breed of South Asian women entrepreneurs is leading Americans to embrace the Indian grandmother’s age-old beauty secrets in new easy-to-use ways. As a marketing strategy, it is Indian tradition marketed in digitally native formats

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Aparajita (Opu) Bhattacharyya

Aparajita (Opu) Bhattacharyya

Product Strategy & Monetization | Microsoft Azure, Seattle

FF Daily #291: Should you shift from WhatsApp?
·Founder Journeys

FF Daily #291: Should you shift from WhatsApp?

February 5, 2021: Meditations on entrepreneurship; Misinformation—WhatsApp vs Signal and Telegram; How to read online reviews; Be yourself

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

Trendspotting 2021: Inside India’s Great Digital Reset
·Venture Ecosystem

Trendspotting 2021: Inside India’s Great Digital Reset

A new set of winners and losers are poised to emerge from the ashes of the pandemic. And a wall of foreign capital is pouring in to fund a slew of digital startups. A peek into what 2021 portends

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Haresh Chawla

Haresh Chawla

Investor | Entrepreneur

When the Swiggy generation rediscovers the home kitchen
·Product & Innovation

When the Swiggy generation rediscovers the home kitchen

Home food was boring for millennials, but the pandemic and the sudden loss of options to eat out or order in is forcing them into the kitchen. They are discovering the joys of being creative and the assurance of being self-sufficient, but they still want convenience. Food entrepreneurs are taking note

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Rachita Kapoor
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Sanjeev Kapoor

Rachita Kapoor & Sanjeev Kapoor

The doughnut and the hole
·Social enterprise

The doughnut and the hole

A message for social change-makers seeking ‘impact on scale’ even as sources of funding dry up: Stay focused on the purpose (the doughnut) and not the scale and brand of your organisation (the hole). Innovate. And learn to be a catalyst

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Arun Maira

Arun Maira

Former Chairman, BCG India | Member, Planning Commission

WFH Daily #180: The Paytm playbook
·Founder Journeys

WFH Daily #180: The Paytm playbook

September 19, 2020: How to say no; Climate change—a harder problem than the pandemic; Four Covid-19 personality types

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

Everybody loves a startup…
·Founder Journeys

Everybody loves a startup…

Or maybe not, as Pallavi Desai found out when she told her dad she wanted to take the plunge. But dad Santosh Desai, CEO of Futurebrands, thinks it’s appropriate to ask any venture hard questions. And they’ve both learnt from Pallavi’s startup journey

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Pallavi Desai
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Santosh Desai

Pallavi Desai & Santosh Desai

What to copy from China
·Founder Journeys

What to copy from China

The Growth Factor: Local problems, global solutions; China strategy; MSME loans

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N S Ramnath

N S Ramnath

Senior Editor | Founding Fuel

Six learnings on innovation from anti-Covid efforts
·Product & Innovation

Six learnings on innovation from anti-Covid efforts

Organisations across the spectrum have been able to get their act together, focus, and solve tough problems quickly. This makes you wonder—why are they unable to muster even a fraction of this ability in normal times?

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Rishikesha T Krishnan

Rishikesha T Krishnan

Former Director, IIMB | Professor of Strategy

The Satara uprising
·Founder Journeys

The Satara uprising

Across Maharashtra, fresh farm produce was rotting after supply chains were disrupted by the national lockdown. The local administration in one of the districts offered a window of opportunity to small farmers’ collectives to build a farm-to-home model—and dramatically turn the tide

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Anmol Shrivastava

Anmol Shrivastava

Entrepreneur, strategist, and technology consultant

Masterclass: Shaping startup culture
·Founder Journeys

Masterclass: Shaping startup culture

‘We are customer-driven’, ‘we are data-driven’. Those are typical refrains from companies. But are they really? It all boils down to culture

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

Why ethnography is the fuel for innovation
·Ethnography and Design Thinking

Why ethnography is the fuel for innovation

Ethnography is a life skill that many business executives and entrepreneurial leaders need to learn. It keeps them grounded and in tune with the lives of real people they hope to serve

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

Where do ideas come from?
·Product & Innovation

Where do ideas come from?

Great ideas are built on a base of hard work and many small insights from a range of observations

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

What they don't teach you at the IITs
·Founder Journeys

What they don't teach you at the IITs

Entrepreneurs need to be able to understand humans, individually and as a collective. For them, a liberal arts education is necessary. Because the scientific method teaches you inquiry. But the humanities teach you to apply that inquiry to yourself

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Tanuj Bhojwani

Tanuj Bhojwani

Fellow | iSPIRT foundation

Walk a mile in the user’s shoes
·Product & Innovation

Walk a mile in the user’s shoes

For ground-breaking innovation, keep the user at the centre, and get a good cultural understanding of the actual place where your product will be used

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

The walls of innovation
·Product & Innovation

The walls of innovation

It requires sustained effort to move innovation from a poster on the wall to conversation and action in the hall

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

Embrace chaos and ambiguity to build world class software products
·Founder Journeys

Embrace chaos and ambiguity to build world class software products

Products often mean you are embarking on a choppy, risky, longish journey. You are thinking about a customer problem from first principles, with no sight of when you will get anywhere close to a business model, revenues, customers and profits

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Amit Ranjan

Amit Ranjan

Architect for the National Digital Locker Project | Ministry of Electronics and IT

The difficulty of entrepreneurship
·Venture Ecosystem

The difficulty of entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs operate in an environment where consumers want the best a capitalist society can offer, but insist on protectionism of the kind only a socialist system confers

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

The root of human ingenuity
·Product & Innovation

The root of human ingenuity

This Week: Behind the Wunderman-JWT global merger, Facebook’s moral dilemma, the changing nature of work, digital inclusion, creative imagination and more

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

The best of 2018
·Venture Ecosystem

The best of 2018

Walmart vs Amazon, how large firms and start-ups can partner for innovation, societal platforms, startups and the ease of doing business, dreamers vs entrepreneurs, the trouble with B-Schools, grand challenges, and the purpose of enterprise

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

Paul Allen the artist versus Bill Gates the entrepreneur
·Founder Journeys

Paul Allen the artist versus Bill Gates the entrepreneur

There are artists and entrepreneurs. Their stories aren’t pretty. But tough calls must be taken. Their stories can be found across the world, India included where the IT Services business is staring at a tough time

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Charles Assisi

Charles Assisi

Co-founder and Director | Founding Fuel

Aadhaar and the three laws of tech for entrepreneurs
·Founder Journeys

Aadhaar and the three laws of tech for entrepreneurs

In listening to the Supreme Court pronounce its verdict on Aadhaar, some pointers emerge to the vagaries of entrepreneurship

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Charles Assisi

Charles Assisi

Co-founder and Director | Founding Fuel

Aadhaar and tech entrepreneurs
·Founder Journeys

Aadhaar and tech entrepreneurs

In listening to the Supreme Court pronounce its verdict on Aadhaar, some pointers emerge to the vagaries of entrepreneurship

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Charles Assisi

Charles Assisi

Co-founder and Director | Founding Fuel

Big Data in the Age of Biology
·Venture Ecosystem

Big Data in the Age of Biology

Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple sound old. Investors have their eyes on startups invested into healthcare and personal medicine

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Charles Assisi

Charles Assisi

Co-founder and Director | Founding Fuel

Speed and critics vs. velocity and the moon
·Founder Journeys

Speed and critics vs. velocity and the moon

Critics celebrated Team Indus’ for not making it to the moon. But that is the nature of critics. Those who can imagine and have muscle, continue to aim for the moon

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Charles Assisi

Charles Assisi

Co-founder and Director | Founding Fuel

Those who see problems as opportunities
·Product & Innovation

Those who see problems as opportunities

This Week: Frugal innovation and doing better with less, fixing affordable housing, what ails research in B-schools, and the world in 2018

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

The alchemy that transforms adversity into opportunity
·Product & Innovation

The alchemy that transforms adversity into opportunity

The very scarcities of resources India faces gives it a natural advantage in taking leadership in frugal engineering and rewriting the playbook on innovation. In a session hosted by CII, Gopichand Katragadda, Navi Radjou, Shantam Shukla, Suneel TS and Vaibhav Chhabra discuss how

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Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel

How to innovate for India
·Product & Innovation

How to innovate for India

Entrepreneurial leaders like Medtronic Labs’ Omar Ishrak and Khan Academy’s Salman Khan are showing how low-cost, disruptive, local solutions can open up new opportunities in emerging markets

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Indrajit Gupta

Indrajit Gupta

Co-founder and Director | Founding Fuel

Celebrate authentic failures
·Product & Innovation

Celebrate authentic failures

In his new book ‘A Biography of Innovations’ R Gopalakrishnan, former Tata Sons executive director, talks about learning from mistakes and the importance of intellectual curiosity, collective ingenuity and storytelling

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D Shivakumar

D Shivakumar

Operating Partner | Advent International