This is by way of a quick follow up to Shamnad’s superlative post on romanticising innovation a couple of days ago. Here’s a link to a very engaging talk by Prof Anil Gupta, the primum mobile behind the HoneyBee Network, from the TED Network. (Image from here)
It lasts for about 20 minutes, and I would urge all of you to take some time out to listen to this talk – the download link below the video gives you various options to listen to it as a podcast, etc as well. (If you have more time, browse around for other talks — TED is a diamond mine that you’ll never want to leave once you’re hooked!)
During the talk, Prof Gupta is full of punchy one-liners, including a classic right at the beginning, “the minds on the margin are not marginal minds!”. He brazenly dismisses Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as an obstacle to innovation, which comment has set off a long discussion below the video. The talk may be a pitch for the Honeybee network, or at least, the concept behind the network, but it also prompts you to think about issues such as conventional endorsements of scalability, and the parochialism of communities that believe innovation will only emerge from certain spaces/conditions (hence Maslow).
Please do watch to learn more about how the grassroots to global (G2G) business model may just become the mantra of the century.
