For over two decades, Dr.Prasad Kaipa has played a pivotal role as a strategic advisor and coach to CEOs, board members and senior executives in Fortune 500 companies. He is the Executive Director Emeritus of the Centre for Leadership, Innovation and Change at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He recently introduced a new course on transformational leadership called “Igniting the Genius Within” at ISB for the PGP students.

MBAUniverse.com interviewed Dr. Prasad Kaipa to know more about this course and his views on the importance of innovation for MBAs and B-school educators.

Excerpts of the interview:

Q: You have recently launched a new course “Igniting the Genius Within” at ISB for the PGP students. We would like to know what makes it unique and what will be the key learnings?
A: I launched a new course on transformational leadership: Igniting the Genius Within in ISB for PGP students this term. I focus on helping students moving from self-centered perspective to other-centered perspective. What makes it unique is that it focuses on students, their authentic leadership, discovering their strengths and weaknesses, taking on a project that helps others become leaders etc. They have to do projects bringing what they learn to the community in addition to developing self-awareness. They bid for the course as any other course in ISB and I currently have 60 students in my class.

The USP is that it helps them to discover their personal DNA – what is the longer term purpose that I call North Star, what is their core incompetence – where is their feet nailed to the floor. In addition, they learn about what gives them energy and what drains their energy quickly. It helps them to know themselves and where they want to go so they can be better prepared for placements, choosing their options and have self confidence. I also use a lot of movie clips to teach things that cannot be taught in traditional analytical and logical approaches.

Q: Are there any key initiatives that you have worked on to promote an innovation-centric mindset among MBAs? Please share your experiences with students?
A: I have been developing modules and helping students and educators to understand key differences between creativity, ingenuity and innovation. Jugaad, for instance, is an example of Indian ingenuity which is application of their creativity. Everybody has creativity but not everybody is innovative and even if they are, not in the same way.

In addition, I found that there are multiple levels of innovation and not all innovations are the same. Finally, I also think about innovation value chain and feel that at least three links in the value chain should be strongly connected for ROI on innovation to be positive.

I found that Indian students are bit different than their western counterparts. Indian students seem to be more dependent, not as much independent thought on the growth side. On the other hand, they are quick to learn, extremely creative and have less awareness of themselves.

Q: We have discussed in detail about innovation and MBAs but I’d like to know how your experience has been with MBA educators?
A: My experience has been that many educators are interested in innovation but may have difficulties in changing their way of thinking. We have to get a way for the faculty to loosen up, try out a pilot project differently and then once they are comfortable, we can take them to the next level. Suddenly, we can’t expect them to change. We must also realize that there may be educators who are already teaching innovation or working towards it, but there will be a lot of resistance to it from others. We need to change that. The right culture needs to be cultivated.

Q: There are no courses in innovation in specific areas of management education such as HR, marketing and many more. What are your suggestions about this? Are there any examples you wish to share?
A: You are right about not having much focus on innovation. We are creative thinkers and have a lot of ingenuity but scaling up that with high quality and superior service is what makes us succeed through innovation and demonstrate leadership through innovation. We have to learn to think out of box solutions and get out of entitlement mindsets. We don’t know how to methodically think out of our comfort zone and come up with solutions that are world class. We become more easily satisfied and think short term in general.

If we can get students to distinguish creativity and innovation, learn about multiple kinds of innovation (business model innovation, process innovation, product innovation, service innovation) and find ways to collaborate to innovate, we will go a long way.

We need innovation courses all the way from High school, let alone basic degree college. We have to think about competitions like ‘Odyssey of the Mind’ for younger students and find a way to channel their youth energies to discover more of India and wherever they live.

Q:I read an article you had written in Bloomberg BusinessWeek with Navi Radjou discussing in detail about “Do Multinationals really understand globalization?” Can you share your thoughts on how Indian MBAs who want to be entrepreneurs and future leaders can develop a global mindset? How does it lead to measurable outcomes for them?
A: First, students need to know how their mindset is different from others and that everybody does not share the same perspective and mindset. Once there is awareness that there are no black and white approaches to do things in the global context but different approaches work in different part of the world and in different cultures for different audience. This is critical and very difficult to communicate it at a deep mindset level. That is the reason why, people keep doing what they have done before and feel comfortable in their own approaches, cultures and languages even after settling in different countries for decades. (I am one such example).

So being an entrepreneur or future leader means becoming comfortable with diversity, ambiguity, complexity and learning how to become aware, pay attention to differences, take actions that customers and partners care about even though one might not.

Once they are open to differences, then the next step is to learn about opportunities and consciously pay attention to what is possible together. We really have to learn to partner and team with people. We are very good individually and have a ‘jugaad’ mindset that works in getting things done in short term but ‘jugaad’ by itself is not scalable.

Third point is that students need to take initiative in helping and assisting others without expecting anything in return. In that process they develop ways of partnering and seeing mutual benefits by working together.

Finally, one has to realize that global mindset is not one mindset. It is different from one’s own but it is about being open, receptive, attentive and learning in the moment and adapting to differences – mostly unanticipated differences. It requires a lot of mindfulness, initiative and going against ones instincts. You can call it global thinking and that is very critical for students to learn.

In terms of measurable outcomes, by developing global mindset, students see opportunities that are invisible for outsiders. When they partner, they can synergize and build things that they could not do it by themselves. Finally, they can capture value and collaborate where foreigners and foreign companies cannot initiate ventures. There are many more, like being able to scale the organization quickly globally, getting investment from different parts of the world, taking advantage of different skill sets and different competencies.

Q: In the same aforementioned article, you had mentioned the Global Student Study 2010, which is based on a survey of more than 3,600 graduate and undergraduate students worldwide. Could you share with us some highlights from the survey in the context of Indian MBAs?
A: Students from around the world understood complexity issues as well as CEOs and the importance of creative leadership. In addition, they also understood the technological levers and dials better than their CEO counterparts. In addition, they pay more attention to welfare of the world and sustainability issues than CEOs.

This is what we wrote in HBR blog (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/06/ibm_just_released_its_global.html)

“Sadly for senior managers, the student study reveals a big discrepancy between these future leaders' view of the world and that of present CEOs. Indeed, twice as many students as CEOs say that "globalization" and "environmental issues," as they converge, will have a significant impact on organizations of the future. In particular, those students who believe that economic power is shifting from developed to emerging economies are much more likely to expect a major impact of sustainability issues.

These future leaders view sustainability as a globally-interconnected phenomenon. For them, the rapid growth in emerging nations like India and China and continued high consumption in developed countries will soon deplete natural resources like water and energy, creating global resource scarcity. Interestingly, while 65% of students believe that scarcity of resources will significantly impact organizations in coming years, only 29% of current CEOs believe so. In North America, students are three times as likely as CEOs to believe this.”

Q: The global business environment is becoming unpredictable. Would you like to share any advice to Indian MBAs about how to address this or prepare towards meeting the challenges ahead in this context?
A: Students have to be 'reframers'. Navi and our colleagues in Cambridge worked with me to explore what we call 'mental model innovation'. It is about thinking differently about ourselves before we launch a business model innovation or R & D innovation. You can find more about them here:
• http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/07/how_reframers_are_unleashing_a.html
• http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/09/see_innovation_opportunities_w.html

My advice to Indian MBAs is to take the bull by the horns. The diversity, interconnectedness, velocity, scarcity and ambiguity (DIVAS of complexity) are here to stay and we have to find a way to manage complexity and learn crisis leadership. Then you have to be more open and learn to shift your mental model based on customer feedback, high quality, scalability and affordability. They must believe in themselves and invest in developing self- awareness and pay attention to what is important to them instead of blindly doing what others have done in the past.

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