Business Innovation and Analytics with BerkeleyHaas

Lead Instructors:

• Solomon Darwin (Executive Director, Ctr for Growth Markets & Garwood Ctr for Corporate Innovation, Haas)
• Gauthier Vasseur (Executive Director, Fisher Center for Business Analytics, Haas)

Teaching Faculty:

• Dr. Arding Hsu (Ret. CEO & President of Siemens Technologies)
• Dr. Murali Krishna (Ret Director of JNTU)
• Dr. Anil Shah (Cardiologist, Business Entrepreneur and Chairman of the Smart Village Movement)

Corporate Mentors:

• Dr. Deepu Rathi (Sr. Director, Cisco)
• Dr. Bandyopadhyay Gautam (Innovation Director, Siemens)
• Mr. Robert Locke (SVP, Johnson Controls)
• Mr. Uday Kapoor (Engineer, IIT Delhi; Documenter, Computer History Museum, Silicon Valley)
• Mr. Raymond Liao (Managing Director, Samsung)
• Mr. Timo Wadhawan (CFO, Heartwood 3D)

Learning Objective:

Create business model solutions to address the pain-points of rural populations with support from Smart Village Movement teams and participating firms (Salesforce, SAP, Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, LearnOnMobile, LinkedIn, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, Pratham, 3D Manufacture, The image school, Inno school, Teacher app). Understand the basics of data and analytics to be able to understand and implement digital transformation projects as part of these proposed solutions.

Project Description:

Develop a launch-ready business model solution for already-identified challenges in one of eight verticals:

• Education,
• Agriculture
• Healthcare (includes Water & Sanitation)
• Information & Communication Technology
• Energy
• Entrepreneurship (Livelihood/Small Business)
• Safety and Security
• Transportation.

Solutions are developed through researching and understanding on-ground realities and challenges in villages. Proposed business models should be scalable based on an ecosystem approach that benefits all stakeholders within the business ecosystem.

Purpose-driven Project:

Rural populations represent one of the world’s largest untapped markets and offers scale and an immense opportunity for firms to build sustainable business models. Unlike the urban markets, the rural markets are unsaturated and offer first-mover advantage to those firms willing to explore and experiment with disruptive business models. No strategy or model will work in rural areas unless it is rooted in genuine care for the people to address their pain points. Projects should empower people at the bottom of the pyramid to access global markets through digital technologies and open innovation platforms for socioeconomic development in rural areas. This approach will promote a sustainable customer base for firms to expand markets through low-margin, high-volume strategies. Villages offer both scale and scope to firms for sustainable economic development. The goal is to develop business model solutions that address villagers’ pain points through interaction with the five resource groups listed below. The business model solutions need to be:

• Accessible, affordable, frictionless, transparent, and adaptable.
• Scalable and sustainable to all villages within a state. Each student will choose one project/ challenge and develop a business model that is scalable and sustainable models for rural areas.

Students will have access to and can pick projects from innovation platforms. Completing a project is required to pass the course. Students are expected to work individually but can form their own support ecosystem of advisers and experts to help them. The students are expected to show an aspirational, entrepreneurial mindset, be self-starters, and draw knowledge and information from various sources on their own.

Digital and Business Analytics Empowerment:

As a foundational skill set, students will be trained to work with data and digital technologies. This business analytics literacy will enable them to improve their business models, assess opportunities, and track their activities accurately and sustainably. It will also empower them to work with more visibility and agility. Finally, this competency will improve their ability to collect and leverage the data available to them while researching their projects.

Platforms:

Students will be introduced to the following sources for project ideas:

• NASA’s unused IP is available for researching potential commercial applications and business solutions.
• Smart Village Movement Platform - students can choose from challenges posted on the open innovation platform. Project categories fall into eight vertices:
  1. Education
  2. Agriculture
  3. Healthcare (includes Water & Sanitation)
  4. Information & Communication Technology
  5. Energy
  6. Entrepreneurship (Livelihood/Small Business)
  7. Safety and Security
  8. Transportation
• Plug & Play start-up base - students can research applications from 10,000 startups and 280 corporate partners for potential commercial applications in rural Areas.
• Berkeley Skydeck - Another source for potential project ideas to research commercial applications in the context of a smart village from 400 active startups.

Five Resource Providers for Students to Develop Innovative Solutions:

• Smart Village Movement (SVM) Platform: The SVM platform contains a library of challenges for students to select and undertake projects based on their passions. The SVM Open Innovation Platform was conceived and designed at the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation by Solomon Darwin to enable students to formulate and accelerate solutions to rural problems in Rural villages. The platform offers five Open Innovation resources for students:
  1. Technology stack (list of emerging technology solutions that have been researched and put on the platform by the open innovation community.
  2. Tools to develop business models for these emerging (half-baked and fully baked) technologies.
  3. Collaborative forums to engage with other ecosystem stakeholders to develop their innovative ideas.
  4. Repository of data and knowledge that is being continually updated to build better models.
  5. Past projects, presentations, and surveys that will provide good examples from which students can learn and improve their business models without reinventing the wheel.
• The SVM Platform engages all stakeholders in one place to accelerate solutions. This facilitates timely collaboration, data collection, and knowledge sharing, and eliminates the need for emails and telephone calls that take up time. All requests are made and submitted via the SVM platform to accumulate information, data, use cases, research, surveys, opportunities, failure cases, success cases, and available technologies for all to use across verticals. This facilitates resource and knowledge sharing and saves time by eliminating redundancy and duplication. We will train and equip students to use this tool effectively to optimize the project outcomes. We’ll also assist students with designing surveys, data sourcing, and analysis to help formulate and pivot business models on the ground.
• Books and SVM Manual: Solomon Darwin published a manual called “Creating Smart Villages” based on actual on-the-ground experiences in Areas. The 2nd book, called “Smart Villages of Tomorrow – The Road to Mori,” is another resource for students. This book describes the first smart village prototype developed in collaboration with Silicon Valley firms in the Mori Village. The book explores the successes and failures of various business models attempted during this experiment with the government of Areas in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Darwin has published several Harvard cases on Smart Villages, as well as a white paper on Smart Village Ecosystems for Bill Gates during his visit to India’s Ag Tech Conference in 2017. All these resources are available on the platform and on Amazon.
• Student Self-formed Support Group: The SVM platform is a workplace for enrolled students to engage with other students, but assignments need to be turned in individually. However, each enrolled student is expected to recruit their own support group outside of the enrolled cohort during the course term. The support group and mentors should be diverse and may include family members, friends, and experts willing to help them with this project – this is how open innovation happens – good ideas come from unanticipated sources.
• On-the-Ground Smart Village Team: This team is Berkeley-trained in business models, open innovation, and lean start-up approaches to conduct pilots. This SVM team is another resource for students to access as they research and work on their projects. The SVM teams work directly with the Office of the Chief Minister in states where pilots are being performed. The team interfaces with government officials that include Principal Secretaries related to each of the eight verticals.
• Participating Corporate Executives: Students can work with various firms that are piloting the business models on the ground to assist them in designing surveys and collecting relevant data for analysis and feedback. The full list of some sixty firms engaging in the pilot projects is attached.

Instruction and Method of Working:

Instruction will take place in the class by the teaching faculty as shown on the schedule below. By the end of the two-week instruction period, students are expected to finalize their projects. The following weeks students will work independently and may take advantage of weekly mentor office hours. All students are required to sign up on the SVM Open Innovation Platform. The stakeholders on the platform include: villagers in pilot villages, key government officials, academics, corporate executives, startups and students from local and international universities. The platform will be utilized to capture data and information as it is generated for analysis and developing models. The platform is intended to foster collaborative innovation by engaging all stakeholders across industries. This approach focuses on solving challenges by delivering models for cost-effective speed-to-market solutions. Students will be encouraged to study both the supply chains and value chains in recommending total product/service solutions (supply chains involve all parties in fulfilling a customer request and leading to customer satisfaction, while a value chain is a set of interrelated activities a company uses to create a competitive advantage). Ecosystems result in

1. Cost elimination
2. Risk-sharing
3. Knowledge flow and exchange
4. Time savings
5. Speed to market for farmers and village merchants.

The students are expected to formulate and recommend an ecosystem for their proposed business model. Efficient ecosystems are formed when firms come together to help the end customer prosper in the long-term to grow his or her business. An ecosystem is like the human body, consisting of many essential parts that work together in full cooperation and coordination to deliver value to its most distant extremities in a timely and efficient way.

Final Presentation (paper) and Deliverables:

Develop a launch-ready solution to a specific village challenge posted on the SVM Platform in any one of the eight verticals approved by the course instructor:

1. Education
2. Agriculture
3. Healthcare (includes Water & Sanitation)
4. Information & Communication Technology
5. Energy
6. Entrepreneurship (Livelihood/Small Business)
7. Safety and Security
8. Transportation

The solutions should be based on technologies delivered through open business models, platforms and ecosystems.

• Evaluate both failure and successful use cases to affirm the model that is being piloted and make suggestions.
• Recommend alternative solutions (technologies and business models) that could be a better fit to address the villagers’ pain-points based on your research.
• Assess the models being piloted to analyse how you could test its scalability and sustainability based on data and information you have collected.
• Suggest improvements to the current pilot process through feedback and data collected from the ground team.
• Quantify the socioeconomic impact if your suggested model is employed in all villages in the state.

University undergraduate and graduate students, Business Professionals, Entrepreneurs, SMEs