Guest blogger: Santosh Harakamani at Volvo IT in Bangalore, India. Santosh provided one of the winning ideas in our yearly innovation JAM!
It was reflection time for me at the end of a successful daylong workshop with Customer. A great day spent across the table with Customer; sharing the growth path, vision, strategy and more eager than us to try the prototype involving their customer and customer’s customer! It was a rare occasion when head of sales & marketing at customer and their regional teams spending full day with lots of energy and agreeing for the next joint plan.
Sounds like a good business meeting, just that it was not. The meeting was to discuss my idea “Telematics on School buses” selected at the JAM IT 2012. A proud moment seeing the idea has reached the customer to try the prototype jointly with VIT through a well-crafted and executed prototype model.
I still remember the day the Idea was selected and an amazing progress so far facilitated by Tommy Hansson at TechWatch and Business Innovation. Like many of us I have been through several idea/innovation forums in earlier organizations, however this has been a thorough learning experience working within highly matured prototype model developed by TWBI; Starting from refining idea, carefully involving key people who could add value to the process, bringing in technology phase, including key customer representatives to brainstorm for a business prospect, carefully deciding the phase when to connect with customer to present the prospect.
Now we have reached a level where we have an eager customer that wants to be an early bird in the market to test the prototype. Thanks to a great team and teamwork facilitated by Tommy involving Chandrika Shetty from VGT, Henrik Wilford from VGT and commute safer and myself bringing larger perspective to the prototype. An effective hand on demo of prototype by Chandrika and team added further eagerness to customer.
Now that we have reached this stage involving customer, it’s a larger responsibility to execute further phases jointly and hopefully for a commercial pilot/launch meeting customer needs.
Indeed a proud day seeing just an idea taking life. It’s a great culture where “innovation” is one of the strategic areas and platforms like JAM IT where just like me anyone could contribute.
