I love our top-9. We covered the entire gamut: bread-and-butter Softtek expertise to disruptive new technologies. The top-9 represents an opportunity for us to showcase diverse talent, scope, and confirm the relevance of Innoventures.
As with all internal innovation machines, Innoventures, too, is validated based on the outcome of its participants. There is a constant internal tussle on how we innovate, where we innovate, or how we validate the need for a formal innovation platform. Internal innovation houses are different from traditional VC firms in the sense that the ideas need to blend in within Softtek’s ecosystem and still demonstrate a ‘cool-factor’ – a special spark or uniqueness. We remain committed to our associates only and depend on our innate ability to bring out the best within our talent pool. As with other large corporations, there is a natural inertia to adopting the wild ideas or finding a home for them. And, on the other hand, the ideas that seem perfectly suited and tailor-made for Softtek seem too easy.
Our judges, in our first class of Innoventures, made a very smart move. They perhaps picked the ideas that are most likely to succeed within the Softtek organization. These ideas would almost instantly validate why and how Innoventures in relevant within the company. These ideas provide a quick relief to a known, quantified, and identified challenge facing Softtek. They also picked the two most daring ideas in our bucket. At some level, each judge also houses a hope of utter disruption – finding and re-introducing Softtek over and over again with different capabilities and in different markets. Jointly, the strategy here is encouraging – some level of instant gratification blended in with pain.
If this strategy continues, chances are that even if we fail to introduce a disruptive idea every year, we can identify and rollout some easy winners. This ability to hedge risk, given that Innoventures is part of a bigger company, gives us the privilege to experiment.
We are entering a very interesting phase! Our Top-9 are here! In the future, our blogs will be specific to each initiative and the general progression of this group as a whole. Innoventures is also gearing up to launch its next class! We hope to discuss the challenges of rolling out an internal division and launching something brand new. Innoventures’ ideas will form business units, divisions within Softtek, new entities, or find partners. There is so much for us to look forward to.
