REPORT ON VISITS AROUND SANFRANCISCO

WITH FICCI-EPSI DELEGATION

Submitted by

Dr.M.K.Badrinarayanan,

Professor – School of Management & Coordinator – HTBI & HEIC,

Hindustan University

DETAILS OF VISITS DONE IN SANFRANCISCO

The FICCI – EPSI organized for the following visits in San Francisco for a

select delegation from NAFSA India Pavilion.

The aim of the visits was to provide an exposure to the various initiatives

taken up at the Silicon Valley to promote entrepreneurship and understand

how the stakeholders in the eco-system work with each other.

Date Places visited

June 1, 2017 1. Tandem Capital

2. TiE Silicon Valley

3. Edcast

June 2, 2017 1. Stanford University – Shriram

Engineering Centre & D-Studio

2. Uber Research Centre

This report is a summary of excerpts from the interactions with the

dignitaries in each location.

In every interaction there were some discussions regarding the role of higher

education institutions in nurturing entrepreneurship.

A colour coding of the text has been adopted to facilitate an easy recognition

of some key aspects and save the time for readers.

Colour Codes in Text:

Text in Blue For follow up

Text in Red For attention

Text in Green We are already doing this

June 1, 2016

Meeting with Mr.Sunil Bhargava, Partner, Tandem Capital

An IIT Madras Graduate settled in Silicon Valley since 1986

Passionate about product development

Has more than 25 years of deep technology and marketing, including

Xerox PARC, HP, Oracle, Webvan and Business Signatures.

Tandem Capital is his fourth venture

Tandem works with Angel Prime and Sama Capital in India. But is not

looking to invest in Indian startups directly.

Tandem feels, Indian investors have better judging capabilities of the

local scenario.

Key excerpts from the interactions with Mr.Sunil

“Channel innovation” is getting more important than “Product

Innovation”. Channel is absolutely important.

Steps to build a startup: Build Brand first, Channel next and then build

product

Investors would want to invest in businesses which have the potential to

“become big” and move fast.

They invest in the thesis, not the product. Hence follow the steps said

above.

Have a credible proof of your business

Understand who is your customer and why do they buy from you? Many

startups do not have answers for this fundamental question. They are

more obsessed with their product innovation.

‘You can never SELL! People only BUY what they want!’

What works in US market may not work in India. For example, Tial costs

USD 20. It is an impulse purchase here. It won’t be so in India. So,

understand your customer and ask “Why would they buy?”

Three keys to success of a startup – Timing, Team and Product (in the

sequence)

Startups must be interested in/attract/able to get – strong people

Universities should…..

1. Provide real inspiration by inviting entrepreneurs to the campus

2. Help student translate passion into real rules of thumb

3. Make them understand the importance of metrics

4. Get the students realize the importance of selling (infectious passion)

3 Businesses that will work in India…

1. Small money from a lot of people – A viral product; Zero cost of

servicing (eg.) Shareit

2. Infrastructure in a smaller bucket (eg) Reliance Jio (Requires extreme

entrepreneurial capabilities)

3. Serving more lucrative markets (developed nations) – (eg) AI assisted

by humans

Sunil’s Recommended Reads:

Founders @ Work

Paul Gram’s Essays on Startups

TiE Silicon Valley

Ms.Dipty Desai, Program Director, TiE Silicon Valley explained the

activities of TiE Silicon Valley in detail

The role of TiE in promoting entrepreneurship was discussed.

Mr.Sourab Tandon, Board Member TiE SV, observed that “Unlike the US,

which is a major B2B market, the Indian market is B2C. Hence, same

models for promoting entrepreneurship cannot be adopted to India.”

Mr.Vijay N Menon, Executive Director, TiE SV, appreciated the active

collaboration of Hindustan Group with TiE Chennai. He advised our

student startups to participate in the RISE Global Business Plan contest

organized by TiE.

Dr.Anuradha Basu, Professor & Director, Silicon Valley Centre for

Entrepreneurship and Dr.Harry Lee from San Jose State University

explained about the FDP (20 days) and student workshops – 5 weeks (on

entrepreneurship and cyber security) organized by them for faculty and

students across the globe. They have invited our faculty and students

team to take up those training programmes offered in their campus.

All of them endorsed the approach adopted by our TBIs in shaping up the

student innovators and entrepreneurs.

The following Startup founders present in the meeting expressed interest for

exploring business partnership in India:

1. Dr.Kailash Gupta, IIMA Fellow – International Emergency Management

Startup for Disaster

2. Mr.Avneesh Kumar, Founder CEO, Schoolze Inc.

3. Mr.Kumar Gopalakrishnan, CEO & Founder, 1Banyan Inc. – AI assistant

for college students in India.

4. Prof. Mohan Shah, Professor & Program Director, Engineering, Cogswell

College & a consultant to NASA – has expressed interest to work with us

for setting up a Research Centre in Aeronautics.

Meeting with Mr.Karl Mehta, Founder & CEO, Edcast

An investor turned entrepreneur working on digitalizing the learning

space.

He started with the gap between industry needs and knowledge provided

by the universities. “The relevance of their existence shall cease to exist

soon”, he said.

He explained in detail about the changing face of learning from

“Structured formal” learning to “Fluid Micro” learning.

Gave an overview of new experiments in digitalizing learning – African

Virtual University which offers all the degrees through digital learning

He explained about the Edcast’s attempt to adopt Disrupting Operational

Models which moves the approach from Traditional value chain to

Platform expressions.

He gave an overview of the proposed NASSCOM’s Edcast app

There was a discussion on the initiatives like NPTEL and SWAYAM

platforms. Mr.Karl termed them as boring, disengaging and less useful.

He said, abundant content is available today. The challenges lie in

encapsulating them into relevant modules and

provide a seamless learning experience.

He explained that how Edcast allows the faculty

to create courses without any great effort, and

the easy to use learning tool in ‘micro doses’ for

the learner.

He demonstrated that how Edcast can be used

for live streaming and making knowledge

available at ease for the target group

He also explained about the analytics of Edcast

and its uses to enhance the Teaching Learning

process.

Post Script:

Incidentally, the discussions at Stanford on Day 2 referred to the need for

segmenting the degrees into “micro doses” of skills required by the industry.

Sessions @ Stanford University

Excerpts from the Session by Prof. Sharique, Stanford Business School

He appealed that universities should understand the role that basic

research plays in developing a country’s higher education scenario and

creating an ecosystem for flourishing entrepreneurship.

For him, Stanford’s success/uniqueness lies in its ability to promote

basic research.

He said that China has become the second largest country in terms of

number of publications and listed a few key strategies to be learnt from

China in achieving this distinction.

1. There exists a global competition for talent. So the Indian universities

should “Pay Global” to attract and retain talent.

2. Intensive use of Exchange programmes to develop capabilities of

faculty

3. Doing basic research and publishing

Mr.Ankit Gupta, an alumnus of IIT-B and a Student Entrepreneur at

Stanford, has expressed interest to work with our students in the domain of

“Machine Learning”.

Excerpts from the session by Prof. Ronie Shilo, Vice Provost, Teaching

Learning, Stanford University:

Ms.Ronie was previously heading the Stanford Centre for Professional

Development

Stanford works towards producing leaders and people who shall make an

impact on this world. (http://globalimpact.stanford.edu)

Stanford’s success lies in the rigorous selection process and complete

autonomy provided to the teaching faculty in design and delivery of their

courses.

The outcome of teaching learning process is monitored through a proper

information system.

It has been observed that increasing numbers of faculty have been

practicing flipped class room methodology and the notion for building

industry relevant micro skills is gaining popularity.

Intensive research has been taken up at Stanford to assess the changing

face of higher education. This has been documented in a separate

website called www.stanford2025.com

It has been observed in such research that the present form of degrees

shall be changed to micro degrees by segmenting content.

Also universities shall have to acknowledge and amend their systems to

accommodate lifelong learning needs by modularizing the degrees and

providing flexible entry and exit.

Innovation Curriculum for UAE designed by Stanford

Stanford has worked with UAE government on developing a 15 week

curriculum on Entrepreneurship, Design Thinking and Leadership.

All the university teachers have been trained by Stanford team on this

new curriculum which shall be rolled out nationwide in UAE to promote

the thought of innovation and entrepreneurship across the nation among

the students.

EPSI has requested Dr.Ronie Shilo to work with them on conducting a

similar programme for its member institutions.

http://www.stanford2025.com/purpose-learning

From To

Students often declared a major without clear reason

Students pursued meaning and impact through studies and projects

Many alumni worked in the fields unrelated to their majors

Alumni Cited missions as the compass that guided their careers

Students deferred work on social issues until later in life

Global impact labs extended platform for faculty research

http://www.stanford2025.com/open-loop-university

From To

Students received four years of college education, front loaded at the beginning of adulthood

Students received a lifetime of learning opportunities

4 years during the ages 18-22 6 years over a life time

Formal learning occurred in the classroom only

Knowledge was obtained across classrooms and practical settings

Students needed to prove ability by

age 18 to be accepted

Students began studies of a range of

ages

Alumni returned to campus

occasionally for selected events

Populi returned as expert

practitioners and enriched campus life.

Session by Prof.Banny Bannerjee on

Fostering Innovation on a grand scale – the Stanford approach

Prof. Banny is the Director of Stanford ChangeLabs, and teaches Design

Innovation and Strategy at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design

He is one of the proponents of the concept of Design Thinking which is

now widely followed as a tool for innovation across the world.

There are different and sometimes very limited views on what innovation

means. Prof. Bannerjee offered a comprehensive definition of innovation:

“Innovation is outperforming normative modes, to drive new behaviors,

outcomes, value creation and system transformations at scale”.

The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest opportunities. We

need a brand new thinking regime.

Most innovation dies inside companies and bureaucracies if it’s anything

other than incremental, because it threatens them.

To deliver on innovation as a fundamental part of how companies

operate, they must have leaders who know how to foster and support

creative thinking, who enable and support the right kind of risk taking,

who understand the value of ideas and that know how to encourage and

let their teams innovate.

Key steps in innovation

Force yourself to think about the problem without thinking about solutions

Think of scaling since day one and find points of leverage

Look at each individual problem through a variety of lenses

Empathize with the users’ experience; define goals and motivations of the user; test solutions

“Scaled challenges must be met by scaled solutions, not incremental ones.”

– Prof.Banny Bannerjee

The world needs extremely powerful innovation techniques and

implementation systems that can tackle our grand challenges in relevant

time frames. And for that we need to start understanding how can we

encourage, foster and enable scaled innovation in our organizations and

in our own problem solving methodology.

It is first necessary to understand the ecosystem of the problem to be

addressed from different views: science, engineering, data, policy,

industry, business, behavior and innovation.

Phases of building an innovative solution for a real world problem

Phase 1: Scaled intervention strategy – to understand the driving

dynamics of the challenge. That is, to identify underlying phenomena and

the root causes of the challenge, and thus, identify powerful leverage

points to transform the system behavior. The expected outcome of this

initial step is to have clearly identified what to change and how to change

it.

Phase 2: Identify the intervention pathways – Having targeted the most

important set of driving dynamics and root causes, the result of this step

is to design strategic paths of action.

Phase 3: Brainstorm at scale (scale storm) - The scaled innovation work

and solutions can be directed through: positive feedback loops that

reinforce the behavior, resource multiplication, novel economic engines,

distributed systems and piggy backing on previous existing channels.

Hasso Plattner Institute of Design – D-School of Stanford

The d.school helps people develop their creative abilities.

The d.school is positioned as a place, a community, and a mindset.

It has been designed with a lot of fluid spaces which can be re-organized

as per the requirement.

It builds on methods from across the field of design to create learning

experiences that help people unlock their creative potential and apply it

to the world.

D-School promotes the idea that design can be applied to all kinds of

problems.

The d.school works with partners from non-profit, corporate, and

government organizations to develop projects that address real-world

challenges.

The d.school classes challenge the students to tackle problems that are

happening right now, not the ones from a textbook page.

To inspire creative thinking, the d.school brings together students,

faculty, and practitioners from all disciplines, perspectives, and

backgrounds.

The d.school functions on a 100% opt-in culture. The people who are

here want to be here. No student or faculty member at Stanford is forced

to participate.

8 Core Capabilities built at d.School

Navigate Ambiguity Move between Concrete and Abstract

Learn from Others (People & Context)

Build and Craft Intentionally

Synthesize Information Communicate Deliberately

Experiment Rapidly Design your design work

The Walls of d.school with the pictures of students working their with their

discipline details

A d-studio class with completely fluid workspace design

The bay that leads to the BAE studio and studio 2

The BAE studio which addresses the learning of cognition and meta-

cognition

The 3-side movable boards set up for problem based learning. The boards

are portable and can be picked up later by the same team for the next

discussion

A clasroom discussion in progress at D-studio

VISIT TO UBER, SAN FRANCISCO

Meeting with Mr.Akshay, Co-founder, Uber

Mr.Akshay explained the journey of Uber to the visiting delegation

He explained that the Value proposition of Uber was to give back the

valuable time to their customers.

He explained how Uber evolved its business model by working on the

pain points, and how did they go about targeting the taxi market

dominated by an oligopolistic license holders.

He explained how the team has grown from a coffee shop venture to

operations in 70 countries at present.

He explained about the proposed project of Intra-city flying cars and the

pilot operation to be tested in Dallas and Dubai in 2020.

He also shared his views on the proposed Uber food in 80 cities of

Canada.

He explained about the power of data analytics at the Uber Research labs

where countrywise desks are handling data and supporting their

respective country teams.

He spoke about the usage of pricing algorithms in fixing the dynamic

pricing of uber.

He also narrated the importance of working with multi-ethnic and multi-

skills team.

He also shared his views about the various issues in running the

business in different countries and contexts.

He shared a few motivating stories of his successful drivers in the Uber

Driving Community.

The visits around San Francisco have helped a lot to gain a good exposure to

the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Silicon Valley and the active role played by

the Stanford University.

It was a pleasure to receive a strong endorsement from the stakeholders of

Silicon Valley for our approach to encourage the spirit of innovation and

entrepreneurship among our students.

With some minor course corrections and scaled up involvement by more

like-minded faculty, our initiatives shall certainly reach greater heights.

I thank the management of Hindustan Group of Institutions for providing

this great learning opportunity.