NMIMS celebrates 8th University Day, Subroto Bagchi enthralls students

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NMIMS Mumbai recently held a grand function to celebrate its 8th University Day on completing 8 years as a Deemed-to-be University. The theme for this year's celebration was 'Open Minds & Innovative Communities'.
 

Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), Mumbai, recently held a grand function to celebrate its 8th University Day on completing 8 years as a Deemed-to-be University. The theme for this year’s celebration was ‘Open Minds & Innovative Communities’.

 

Mr. Subroto Bagchi, Gardener & Vice Chairman, MindTree, was the Chief Guest on the occasion. He enthralled the audience with his witty and inspiring presentation on what ‘Innovation’ truly entailed. He said that he believed that PowerPoint presentations most often than not had little power, as well as very few points. He believed in the power of pictures more and thus his presentation comprised of pictures rather than text.

With the help of powerful graphics, Mr Bagchi showed how Innocence was critical to Innovation. He believed that innocence was the source of all creativity but the problem was how one got in touch with the creativity within oneself. He said preschoolers tended to be creative geniuses but all this creativity came to naught twenty years later.

Mr Bagchi told the students that he believed Innovation began with Inclusion, required Existential Thinking, and came from Struggle as well as Diversity. Mr Bagchi contended that there were three levels of knowledge: the Technical level at which we find most Indians, the Experiential level where one learned from past experience with customers, etc., and the Existential level where one got into the mind of the customer and began to think how the customer thought.

He gave several examples of Existential thinking. He spoke about how Sony got into the minds of youngsters and worked backwards to come up with the innovative Walkman that youngsters loved to carry around with them. Mr Bagchi also gave an example of how Apple came up with the idea of white cables for their Ipod users and it was found that this helped create a sense of community and kinship amongst all the Apple white cable users wherever they went.

Mr Bagchi showed pictures of the World War and said how such periods of disaster were followed by periods of great innovation like computers, organ transplants, etc. That’s how innovation came—after a great struggle. He said that the greatest innovations started with a simple idea but that it was now more than 600 years since India had seen truly great innovations like the wondrous historical monuments that we had built in the past. However, Mr. Bagchi foresaw a great role for the professionals of our country.

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