Making Breakthrough Innovation Happen:how 11 Indians Pulled Off The Impossible

'Making Breakthrough Innovation Happen' by Porus Munshi is a collection of very inspirational stories of Indians who dreamed big and achieved their dreams. The bureaucrat who cleaned up not only the streets of Surat, but also the psyche of its people. The police officer who made community policing a reality, permanently transforming the police-people relationship in a matter of months. The retired doctor who decided to wipe out unnecessary blindness from India. The engineer who got enraged by the developed world’s apathy and started producing affordable vaccines for the masses.

Product innovators in watches, engine pumps, UPS and shampoos. Redefining services like vehicle finance, readership survey and agricultural supply chain - the list is as varied as it is impressive. Munshi has done a thorough job of collecting and presenting these 11 illustrative case studies, all of them with one underlying theme : extreme innovation; determined pursuit; eventual success.

The book is a must-read for all entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial aspirants. The only jarring note is the disproportionate number of forewords, prologues, introductions, notes and acknowledgements that get between the book and the reader. These tiring and uninformative pages can be safely deleted and the value of the book will only be enhanced. A little more copy editing to cut down repetitive use of stock phrases like ‘orbit-shifters’, ‘radical innovators’ etc could have also helped.

Overall, this is a highly recommended book for any one interested in making a difference to the world we live in.

If you agree with Michael Porter that innovation is central issue in economics prosperity. Porus Munshi’s Making Breakthrough Innovation Happen will provide some hope for India’s next phase of growth. This book is compilation of ‘India Shinning’ –type entrepreneurship and innovation stories: 11 examples extracted from extensive research by Marico Innovation Foundation and profiled in detail. For far too long, western, Japanese and now Chinese have been stock-in-trade for most academics, journalist and other broadcasters. It’s not that Indian examples didn’t exist but finding about then was more difficult. For that reason alone, this book and the underlying research will be most appreciated by growing tribe that reject the pessimism of the “china’s-doing-everything-right-and-we’ll-never-catch-up” brigade. These examples show our way of letting thousand flowers bloom.
The range of examples is extensive, spanning start-ups such as Aravind Eye Hospital and Su-Kam: Public service such as Trichy Police and Surat City; and technology-led firms like Titan ad Shantha Biotech. These examples have a number of common threads: the feature men, who I dreamt big, took on unreasonable challenges, energised others around them and blended the qualities of Inspirational leader and benevolent dictator.
Shantha Biotech’s story illustrates the power of Innovative approach across a project of life cycle; Varaprasad Reddy’s passion in empanelling specialist in the us and in India to work for a truly ambitious cause of eleiminating Hep-B, combating naysayers in bureaucracy and bank, and rejecting conventional wisdom in marketing to ‘go-direct’ through mass vaccination camps were all necessary to keep the torch burning. Similarly, Dainik Bhaskar example describes a radical approach to attacking well-entrenched incumbents. Combining the surveying and selling functions in a large. Well-trained and well-managed team meant that, in each new city. Dainik Bhaskar could immediately reach 200,000 household with relevant product.
However, in focusing on mindsets and philosophies, the book short-changes distilling the other key aspect of major innovations: hard , focussed, purposeful work of which Peter Drucker wrote in his Disciplines of Innovation. This is an enduring feature of every example, but isn’t called out proportionately. In other aspect, the repeated use of tags-‘orbit-shifting’ being the most favoured- detracts from the stories. Simpler memes will help cause betters.
What next, then, for innovation in India? Given the size of the challenges, the number and scale of successful innovation is still too small. We need to identify the new features in our institutional context that most impede that rapid adoption of demonstrably better solutions. Almost 15 years have passed since S. R. Rao led Surat’s transformation but even today his methods and results are far from standard constructs in city governance. To propagate innovation as a way of life for a larger part of society, we need to create conditions where innovation success stories are less arduous than “pulling off the impossible”.