Understanding the Blockchain: A Brief Overview
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Understanding the Blockchain: A Brief Overview

To grasp the widespread applicability of blockchain, it’s essential to understand what it is and how it works. At its core, blockchain technology is an immutable, decentralized ledger of digital transactions shared across a network of computers or nodes. Its crucial strength stems from its public verification mechanism, ensuring unprecedented transparency, security, and resistance to fraud.

This digital marvel operates using a blend of proven technologies such as cryptography, network theory, and game theory. The result? A powerful, decentralized system that promises to revolutionize how we conduct transactions, manage data, and establish trust.

Revamping Supply Chain Management with Blockchain

Supply chain management is one area ripe for blockchain intervention. Traditional supply chain systems grapple with opacity, manual record-keeping, and fraudulent practices. Here, blockchain emerges as a game-changer, offering a robust solution to these challenges.

Blockchain introduces unprecedented traceability and accountability by maintaining a transparent, tamper-proof record of product movement from origin to end consumer. This enhances trust among stakeholders and simplifies dispute resolution. Major corporations like IBM and Walmart are at the forefront of integrating blockchain into their supply chain operations, marking a significant industry shift.

Improving Healthcare with Blockchain Technology

The promise of blockchain in healthcare is vast and varied. One critical application lies in patient data management, where blockchain can ensure secure and efficient data sharing among authorized healthcare providers. This decentralized health record system can drastically reduce errors, enhance privacy, and foster data interoperability.

Another crucial application is pharmaceuticals, where blockchain can enhance drug traceability along the supply chain. This could prove instrumental in the fight against counterfeit drug distribution, a global problem jeopardizing countless lives yearly.

Transforming Finance with Blockchain

Despite being the foundation of cryptocurrencies, blockchain’s potential in traditional finance is nothing short of revolutionary. It’s harnessed for secure and efficient cross-border transactions, eliminating intermediaries and lowering transaction costs.

But that’s not all. The advent of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has taken the financial world by storm. By leveraging blockchain, DeFi platforms enable services like asset management, lending, and insurance in a decentralized setting, effectively challenging the norms of the traditional financial system.

Protecting Intellectual Property Rights with Blockchain

In the digital era, protecting intellectual property rights presents significant challenges. Blockchain technology can provide a solution by acting as a transparent, immutable register for patents, trademarks, and copyrights. This ensures that authors and creators receive their deserved recognition and compensation.

Additionally, blockchain can automate royalty payments via smart contracts, streamlining and rendering the process more efficient and fair.

Enhancing Governance with Blockchain

Finally, let’s delve into how blockchain can transform governance systems. By harnessing the transparency and security of blockchain, governments can enhance public services such as voting, identity verification, and land registry.

The tiny Baltic nation of Estonia provides a shining example of this. It has successfully integrated blockchain into its e-residency programs and other public services, offering its citizens a more transparent, secure, and efficient government system.

Conclusion: Embracing the Future of Blockchain

The transformative potential of blockchain technology reaches far beyond the realm of cryptocurrencies. As we’ve explored, its diverse applications promise to catalyze a paradigm shift across industries, from supply chain management and healthcare to finance, intellectual property, and governance.

The role of blockchain in environmental sustainability is yet another domain of growing interest. As concerns about climate change intensify, blockchain can facilitate carbon trading and management, fostering a more sustainable future. It can verify carbon credits in an immutable ledger, ensure transparency in the carbon market, and help organizations efficiently manage and offset their carbon footprints.

Another emerging field is the Internet of Things (IoT), where blockchain can provide a secure and scalable framework for device-to-device communication. IoT and blockchain can enhance security, privacy, and reliability in the connected world, making it ideal for smart homes, autonomous vehicles, and innovative city applications.

Even the education sector is still subject to the blockchain revolution. Universities and institutions can use blockchain to issue digital certificates, reducing forgery and simplifying the verification process. Moreover, blockchain could enable the creation of a lifelong learning passport, which would facilitate the recognition of skills and qualifications globally, promoting educational and professional mobility.

This vast potential of blockchain technology underscores its promising future. As more industries recognize and embrace this, we anticipate a new era where blockchain becomes a fundamental component of our digital infrastructure. It is, therefore, vital for businesses and individuals to understand and prepare for the transformative impact of this technology, as it has the potential to redefine the digital landscape

Source: https://www.phillybite.com/index.php/travel/66-guide/8557-blockchain-technology-and-its-potential-uses-beyond-cryptocurrency

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Innovation

10 Artificial Intelligence innovations in healthcare

The past year brought the world on its knees, yet it also ushered to the door several essential healthcare innovations. Telehealth and remote care became more widely available due to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic.

The strain on our health system meant that the most forward- looking medical institutions had to evolve new capabilities such as voice assistants capable of servicing hundreds of calls, over and above their usual complement. To speed up processing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) blossomed in various healthcare applications, with big data taking on a significant role in the field of predictive analytics.

These innovations are all rather impressive, and there are many more in the pipeline. However, most of them emerge from the top research centres located worldwide, such as the Mayo Clinic or some small start-ups tucked secretly in Silicon Valley. The truth is that many of them take a long time to become commercially viable, and it might be years before we start reaping their benefits. However, not all the innovation is happening on the other side of the world, and this article will highlight a few projects happening in our backyard.

These are all currently being conducted by researchers at the University of Malta in collaboration with other entities such as Mater Dei Hospital. Their innovative aspect is at par with other projects happening abroad. The researchers do miracles with the meagre funds they receive, many of which stem from the University but also through national, European or even private funding. However, the thing they have in common is that very few people know about them, and for most of the time, the lack of subsequent financing kills the project. The following is a selection of such projects.

3D PRINTED SMART HAND

There have been various projects relating to the creation
of artificial limbs. One of them uses the Open Hand Project
to create a 3D printed hand and enhance it using smart components. The project’s idea was to provide additional functionality to the artificial hand, such as changing the TV volume by moving the prosthetic arm from a distance. Voice recognition integrated within the hand allowed people to utter more complex commands sent back to any smart device in the house. Essentially, it fused a smartphone with an artificial limb.

MAPProHand PROJECT

The project seeks to build a commercial prosthetic hand from scratch. It aims to resolve the trade-off between simplicity, dexterity and usability typically experienced in commercial prosthetics. The project will conduct research on the hand’s optimal dexterity based upon a simple architecture which guarantees its usability. It will then create an artificial hand based upon the parameters proposed by an AI system.

AUTISM VIRTUAL REALITY

The Autism Virtual Reality (VR) application, already discussed in a previous article, lets people experience what an autistic child goes through during a typical day. When the user wears the VR headset, he finds himself in a school setting where he sees, hears, and senses the world through an autistic child’s eyes. The project aims to promote empathy, thus helping educators, careers and people interacting more thoroughly with autistic children.

CEREBRAL PALSY ASSISTANT

The SMARTCLAP project assists children with Cerebral palsy; the most common physical disability in children affecting movement and posture. The project places the user at the centre of the design process by creating a smart device which seeks to increase the child’s motivation. During the various sessions, children sometimes find it challenging to perform the tasks which the therapist suggests. By changing the therapy into a fun game, the researchers hope to get better feedback from them. This concept is called gamification, whereby a typical (sometimes tedious) task, is changed into a game. Various experiments show that gamification is very useful in diverse settings. Through this project, the child is encouraged to develop positive behaviour and improve his social interactions.

AMBIENT ASSISTED LIVING

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) services use technology in a person’s daily life to help them live independently. Several AAL devices have been designed and developed, based on sensors, microphones and vision systems with quite promising results. However, for the field to reach maturity, many challenges need to be tackled, including developing robust processes in the real-world that are easy to use and accepted by society, users and carers. Because of this, researchers are trying to detect rare irregular events using just a standard camera system. Pose estimation models are used to detect a person in the image and extract the body keypoints. The process is usually called skeletal detection, whereby the position of the person’s skeleton is determined just from the picture. This information is essential to detect anomalies such as someone lying unconscious on the ground. Initial studies show some impressive results with the system capable of detecting most of the anomalies. These results also indicate that these methods compare very well with other commercial sensor-based solutions which are much more expensive and inaccessible for most people.

AUTOMATED GAIT ANALYSIS

Gait analysis is the systematic study of walking patterns which normally involves expensive and intrusive marker-based methods, in conjunction with multiple infrared cameras.

When combined, they produce kinematic data that precisely measure the walking behaviour of a person. Once the data is collected, specialists then interpret the conclusions from the kinematic data to make diagnoses. On the other hand this project developed an automated alternative to marker-based methods for gait analysis using standard cameras and AI. The system achieves kinematic data that consists of varying left and right joint angles for hips or knees. Two video cameras pointed at the side and front view of a walking subject capture this information. It then uses pose estimation as a markerless form of motion capture which feeds into a pipeline of algorithms for calculating and processing kinematics. The automated method is quite promising since it achieves results almost identical to that of an expensive marker-based system. Thus it reduces the effort and financial investment needed for gait analysis, leading to a broader diffusion in the health care community. Furthermore, since such a system can theoretically work with just two mobile devices, it would make it ideal for use in remote areas worldwide where the availability of expensive setup is impossible.

SELF-HARM, DEPRESSION AND SUICIDE

The Mental Health Promotion (MEHAP) project tries to help adolescents with mental health issues, leading to self-harm, depression, and increased risk of suicide. The project will launch a mobile phone app co-produced with young people who have self-harmed themselves. It includes many features such as a mood monitoring diary, a personalised self-help menu of mood-lifting activities, audio-taped relaxation and mindfulness exercises. After every use, young people are asked to re-rate their mood and are routed to emergency numbers if they are still feeling an urge to self-harm.

SCHIZOPHRENIA VIRTUAL REALITY

A challenge with teaching health care workers about schizophrenia is that it is hard for them to understand what patients feel. This project uses AI in a VR simulation to immerse the users in a virtual world and help them experience the symptoms that such a patient might feel. The simulation features several simple tasks, which the user attempts while facing challenges associated with schizophrenia, in the form
of visual and auditory hallucinations. AI is applied to the interactive narrative to allow the storyline to adapt to the user’s actions, thus increasing the experience’s immersiveness. Various mental health nursing students tried the experience, and it was well-received. It managed to increase their awareness and fostered empathy for people having schizophrenia. The next phase in this project is to use it as a treatment for the actual patients whereby patients can confront their hallucinations in a safe virtual setting.

PAIN REDUCTION

If the brain is distracted, the perception of pain is decreased even though the stimulus is still present. The idea of distraction as a pain management technique is not novel, and there are several case studies where this was proven to reduce pain perception by up to 50%. VR headsets distract children during routine painful procedures and treatments.

In the UoM’s Morpheus project, the researchers are using biosensors like smartwatches to read biological information. This data will make the VR experience change and adapt in real-time, in relation to what the patient is feeling. If a patient is bored, the game will become exciting. If he is anxious, it slows down and becomes more calming. The initial results have shown that the VR experience is much more effective and reduces the pain felt without the need to resort to any medication.

CANCER DETECTION

Another project which was due to start a few years back uses AI to detect abnormalities in radiographs. The idea was to analyse the imaging data and point radiologists at potential abnormalities. This project would speed up their work drastically and increase their accuracy since some cancers can be easily missed even with the trained eye. In keeping with this, an article published in Nature in 2020, on the application of AI in breast cancer screening, reported a reduction in both false positives and false negatives, when compared to standard radiologist screening. This result does not mean that an AI will replace a doctor any time soon. However, it is an opportunity for any doctor to get a second opinion of his diagnostics in no time and at a meagre cost, thus further reducing the human error rate. This project was the brainchild of Professor Aaron Casha, a brilliant surgeon and visionary who sadly died last year. Unfortunately, the project died with him too.

CONCLUSION

As one can see, the ongoing projects are various, and they touch with all areas of health. Probably there are many other projects which we are not listing here! This list was just a selection to celebrate the researchers involves and to showcase their novelty. These researchers go to great lengths to secure funding, find partners, work on the project, and keep it going after the funds dry out. However, the medical and tech worlds are still far apart. So when an idea brews, take the first step, reach out to the various researchers, and turn it into reality. After all, these innovations are essential to make the lives of people better.

Source: https://towardsdatascience.com/ten-artificial-intelligence-innovations-in-healthcare-3f5b30ea75b5

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In Pakistan, the startup ecosystem fosters an elite group of professionals
Innovation

In Pakistan, the startup ecosystem fosters an elite group of professionals

Fatima Mazhar started her career as an investment banker in Dubai. She worked as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of a company in the Gulf state, and was doing pretty well for herself as a young, up-and-coming senior executive. 

Then she left. 

Not excited by her job anymore, Fatima began searching for her next step when she came across a startup called Careem. The company felt like a good fit, and so Fatima started work there – as a call centre agent. Within a few years, Fatima would go on to become Careem’s head of expansion and eventually launch the ride-hailing app in Pakistan as well. 

Usman Arshad has a similar story. He was a Vice President at J.P.Morgan where he had started off as a talented network engineer. He left the investment bank to join Pakistani fintech startup Sadapay. He still works for Sadapay out of Scotland. 

Fatima and Usman are part of a rising crop of people that have chosen to work in Pakistan’s emerging startup ecosystem rather than for large legacy companies, MNCs, banks, and FMCGs. This, perhaps more than anything, is the biggest contribution that the startup ecosystem has made to Pakistan. 

On the one hand, there are seasoned executives with decades of experience that have shifted careers from legacy banks and MNCs to join startups in leadership positions. Then, there are fresh graduates with degrees from foreign universities and from institutions like LUMS, IBA, and the like that are choosing to apply to and work for startups. 

This has created a base of talent in Pakistan that is being trained in a very different way from how they would traditionally come up through the ranks. Because startups are small operations and focus very much on culture, young employees fresh on the scene get the opportunity to have direct contact with decision makers and take on tasks that they would not normally do in larger corporations. On top of that, they are also paid very well – with average starting salaries at startups beginning close to the six figure mark. Progress through the ranks is also quick, and there is a definite sense of ownership that exists as well. 

At the same time, these young professionals get to interact with and learn from seasoned industry professionals that have decades of experience and have chosen to shift from their traditional career trajectories to work for startups. What does this cultural change in Pakistan’s job market look like? Profit profiled ten of these professionals from different startups – both senior executives that have shifted to startups and recent graduates still making their way to the top. 

 

Confident, candid, and unflappably true to herself, Fatima’s story is grounded in hard-work, self belief and a complete dedication to whatever it is she is doing at any given moment. Perhaps, what strikes out most about her is her complete lack of pretences. Maybe that is why at different points in her career she has been able to accept jobs that others would have baulked at and do them with the same enthusiasm with which she has approached her executive level posts. 

“I play Polo, and people say that playing polo is like playing golf during an earthquake. I think that stands true for a regular job and a startup job as well. Working at a startup is like trying to work during an earthquake. You are constantly firefighting and combating disasters. For people that are free flowing and creative that works much better than a corporate job,” she tells Profit. 

“For me, the most important part has always been making sure I’m justifying the salary I am getting for whatever job I am doing. And I think if you put in the effort, particularly in the startup ecosystem, you will get the recognition you deserve.” 

“I started in 2008 as an investment banker. I did that because I was told it was the place to be. Then the financial crisis hit and I was without a job, so I took up a sort of internship at this company and within two years I became their Chief Operations Officer – which is also where I discovered I was good at operations and wanted to pursue it as a career.”

Now, Fatima could very easily have stuck to this role. It paid well, it was a cushy job in the Gulf, and it could have led her to more senior positions at larger companies. But in 2013 when she started to feel like she wasn’t excited about the work she was doing, she left. “I have never quit a job while I’ve had another job lined up. I feel like that is cheating on the company. At this point, a friend told me that Uber was entering the UAE and I thought that sounds interesting and started looking them up,” she explains. 

“However, anytime I would google them, Careem would pop up because of how strong their search engine optimization was. This really intrigued me, and when I saw they had a Pakistani founder I reached out immediately because it seemed like the right fit for me.” 

Careem was new, however, and Fatima had to start off there as a call centre agent since there was no other opening. Careem told her she would grow with the company, and she did. “I remember my first meeting with Karl Magnus Olsson, one of the founders of Careem. I think if God-forbid I am old and riddled with Alzhemiers that meeting will be one thing I won’t forget. Because when I saw him talk about Careem, I kid you not I saw his eyes light up. And I thought, this is the sort of work I want to do. I want to be passionate about what I do. So I took up the job without a second thought.” 

After this, Fatima threw herself into her work entirely. She rose to become the head of expansion for Careem. She would go to a city, hire a team, train them, launch the app, and then move on to the next city. In two years, she did 286 flights. And the reason she was able to do this was because of the startup ecosystem. 

“At startups you have direct access to the decision makers. Someone at Pepsi won’t be able to meet their COO more than once a month but in a startup an intern can stand up and have their voice heard without consequence. And then of course, everytime someone calls a Careem or mentions it in Pakistan I feel proud because I launched it here and I can claim that this is something I did,” she says. 

In that way, culture has been very important to Fatima. When Uber was acquired by Careem, she had taken a sabbatical to complete her MBA from MIT. She resigned from Careem and moved on to WeTruckIt in Pakistan and worked there for two years. She briefly founded her own startup which did not work out and is currently the COO of Colabs. 

“In the beginning I would stay 20 hours to learn everything about the job. I learned how to code. I got very involved and was even the product manager for a while. That is the thing about this job. It is the same equation – do you want to be a small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond. I feel like the latter is the better option.” 

 

Talib Rizvi has 25 years of experience in commercial banking. He has held leadership positions at Bank Alfalah, Dubai Islamic Bank, and Habib Metro. Articulate, and unfailingly polite, he is completely devoid of the stuffiness that often plagues career bankers whose lives have been spent getting signatures and waiting on a ridiculous chain-of-command that exists in these financial institutions. 

Currently, after decades of working in traditional banks, Talib is working as the Executive Director of a financial technology startup TAG. “Nobody can take my banking experience away from me. I am one of the few faces in startups to have moved from commercial banking and I think many of my colleagues will realise this soon enough. All banks need to look towards digitisation. They are trying right now, but currently digitisation is not their core competence. I am simply trying to stay with the curve, and I think people that move into this early will have an advantage.” 

Talib believes that as the world changes, banks will be slow to digitise which is why institutions like TAG will have an edge in the years to come since their entire foundation will be digital. However, he believes that the young, energetic, founders, investors, and employees coming into these companies need guidance since they are still working within the same regulatory framework that traditional banks are working under. 

“There are so many talented young professionals coming in to work with us. The founders of these startups are also so full of energy and brimming with ideas it is brilliant to witness. I realised looking at this that if people with good financial fundamentals can adapt to the tech wave then there is huge potential for them in this ecosystem,” he explains. According to Talib, while these founders have great ideas they often require a guiding hand from seasoned professionals such as himself. 

{Note from the editorial staff: The English expression, ‘seasoned professionals’ doesn’t do justice to what we mean. ‘Manjhay huay’ in Urdu is what we are essentially trying to describe.} 

“I’m one of the few senior bankers that have shifted to the startup ecosystem. I think there is a big role that my colleagues and I have to play in this. These kids are talented but they are free souls. People need to be around to channelise this energy. That is where experience comes in,” he says. “This is a big challenge particularly with financial sector startups. It is a steep learning curve, but that is why I am around as a guide to take them through the regulatory environment.” 

In this way, Talib imagines a scenario in which the young up-and-coming entrepreneurs aided by professionals such as himself can come together to build a new product in Pakistan’s regulatory environment. It is a question of using each person’s strengths and tailoring them for solutions. 

“Startups are agents of change. A person like me respects the SBP as a fatherly department not as a challenge. Their regulations are not hurdles, they are a facilitation. The problem is that founders and investors have so much energy they do not always know how to control it. The enthusiasm overflows at times. This is where experience comes in. Since I have an understanding of and respect for the regulator, I can help these founders in charting these waters.”  

“In all of this the most important factor will be the kids coming in. This is highly skilled labour and it is the backbone of any economy, and let me tell you there are not enough startups in Pakistan right now. There are many more to come and people will continue gravitating towards them. Startups offer a more open work environment, you get to have an impact, and they are also getting very good salaries.” 

 

With a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale and training and experience as a financial journalist, Meiryum Ali is also a budding executive who has been working at Elphinstone – a personal financial advisory platform – for more than a year. 

Meiryum actually started her professional life as a journalist. She was an award-winning correspondent for Soch and later worked at Profit magazine, where she was both writer and editor. Her stories were crisp, informative, written with talent, and widely well-received. While it was a career she enjoyed, it was the possibility of building something from the ground up that made her gravitate towards joining a startup. 

“I wanted to build something from the ground up. I had spent a lot of time reporting on things being built which created a natural curiosity about how things work. A lot of my friends my age in other careers with very different backgrounds were also gravitating towards tech jobs. Everyone wants to be a part of something new. I just wanted to be a part of something, and while that is a risky business, that risk is something I actually enjoy,” she says. 

However, Meiryum also believes that while the ownership aspect is an important factor in what is attracting young professionals towards the startup ecosystem, equally important is how startups often offer very competitive packages. Since startups are small teams and dedicated to providing quality products, human resources are something they usually spend extravagantly on.

“I have noticed that a lot of startup and tech jobs have really good salaries and benefits. That’s a pretty good way of looking at it. People are being valued. Assuming the bubble doesn’t break, and that this ecosystem is still around, other fields might actually have to pull up their salaries as well.” 

“There is, of course, an element in startups that involves working in disorder, but the people coming in are very talented and take it head first. We are fire-fighting everyday in the startup ecosystem, and in my experience a lot of the young professionals coming up are extremely self motivated self starters that would be valued in any industry anywhere. A lot of fresh grads are really, really used to having a lot of agency. No one is comfortable with hierarchy and that’s a really good thing. I don’t know if that is a generational thing but it is very good.” 

 

Usman Arshad is a young Scottish network engineer with years of experience including working at J.P.Morgan. Ethnically Pakistani, Usman is currently working at SadaPay where he has made a major impact, and was recently part of the team that made in-app biometric verifications possible. 

But why would he leave a company as established as J.P.Morgan to join a relatively new Pakistani startup, that too when it was still very much in its infancy? “In order to produce a high quality product you need to interact with the customer. JP paid me really well but that wasn’t something I got to do there. It’s hard to make changes in a big ship. It takes a long time and a lot of effort. By the time a change is made, it is already too late – so I got sick of that environment,” he tells Profit during an interview. 

Usman is, of course, an anomaly. To maintain a link with his country of origin, he had wanted to get involved in and do work for Pakistan. “I was already looking into things like investment screening. There’s no way to check out the details of a company you want to invest in – how halal it is, how eco friendly etc. Since ethnic Pakistanis would be the biggest market for this, I was looking around when I stumbled across SadaPay and found it fascinating. Because of how unbanked the population is I thought this was definitely good, meaningful work. I got introduced to Brandon, to John etc and I realised this was not what I expected from Pakistan.” 

Usman says that the culture in Pakistan is very ‘consultancy’ based – in that companies look for quick fixes rather than producing quality products and results. In startups, since it is entirely customer focused, you need high quality solutions. “I realised the culture here was very different. I feel like I’ve been able to influence the culture here and helping the unbanked is a noble cause. The goal is to make people’s lives better and easier. That is what we have done, for example with biometric verification,” he explains. 

The biometric verification that SadaPay has enabled in its app has been widely lauded and will remove so many barriers for a lot of people to increase their SadaPay account limits. Under it, people can simply verify their NADRA biometric record through the SadaPay app.  

“At JP, I had autonomy and a big salary but not the same impact. With SadaPay, I get that impact and opportunity to do the work. There is also a bias for people in smaller areas. We want to use technology to bridge that gap. We’re helping customers and that’s the main thing for me – giving opportunities to people that would not otherwise necessarily have those opportunities. That’s the magic of technology and what we can do with it for betterment.” 

 

In 2020, Kinza Adnan had just completed her MBA from LSE when a friend approached her and asked her to apply to a financial technology startup called SadaPay. Right after graduation is an exciting time for people with MBAs. That is the time you are applying to, and actually being considered by large companies like Coca Cola, Nestle, Unilever, and the like. 

Large salary packages are dangled in front of you, and a clear if boring career trajectory presents itself. Having an MBA is the perfect route to becoming a ‘company-man’ and diving head first into the world of corporate bureaucracy. But all of it comes with a price, and one that the current generation of fresh graduates might not be willing to pay. “Back then people did look at me strangely for joining a startup rather than a big company, and I did see my friends getting large salaries. But a year into working at SadaPay and now my friends at Coca Cola and other large companies are asking me if they can send me their CVs,” she tells Profit. 

Young, sharp-minded, and carrying an obvious passion for the work she does, Kinza is one of the many fresh graduates who have chosen startups as their first jobs. She had chosen to do an MBA right after graduating and done some work as a Teaching Assistant at LSE, but she had largely stuck to education until this point. Why did she choose to go this route? In her opinion, workplace culture was the biggest motivating factor. 

“I had it in mind that I wanted to join a startup, particularly a fintech company since I felt there was a lot of room to grow in one. I felt like there were more growth and learning opportunities here. There is generally a casual, fun environment and that helps with creativity. Pakistan is a hotspot for innovation right now, and in a company like SadaPay you have direct access to decision makers which means you can have an impact.” 

“Maintaining this sort of culture is difficult, of course. But our COO still has monthly one-on-ones with everyone. If I ever want to speak to Brandon, I can simply book a slot and not be afraid that I won’t be heard. Then we have things here like a women’s corner, and I think that creates a certain bond among the women working in this space as well,” she says. 

“There is a lot I’ve done here that I’m proud of. I’ve learned to multi-task, I’ve gotten over anxieties, I’ve been the top performer in the customer experience department and have recently been promoted to a role in HR as well – all within a year. In hindsight, there aren’t any regrets and I think this is a great place to be.” 

 

What does a banker have to do with an online job hunting platform? Apparently, a lot. That is why Shahid Kazi, a former commercial banker with decades of experience, became the CEO of Rozee.pk – a career seeking platform that collects resumes for candidates and matches them with businesses where their skills are required. 

And while Kazi brings with him a wealth of experience, one of the reasons for shifting to a platform like Rozee.pk was the desire to build and be part of an organisation centred in innovation and creative decision making. “I am primarily a banker and headed strategy at Bank Alfalah and collaboration with Warid as an extension,” Kazi tells Profit. “I had spent a year in East Africa and that’s when M-PESA was unfolding. Upon return to Pakistan, the initiation of the digital journey of Alfalah was started by the team. Later I moved to CIBG and transaction banking at Habib Metro.”

Kazi is not new to technology. Right before Rozee, he worked at Finca Microfinance Bank as chief operating officer in his last role, overseeing the blending of microfinance with technology when the bank digitised its lending process. This experience brought in him the understanding of and fascination for technology.  

Now, Kazi is leveraging his experience in the financial sector in a purely tech company to build a financial wellness platform. “I was part of developing it and that was a major experience in Pakistan’s tech stack. The way the penetration of smartphones and 3G and 4G were increasing, we knew a change was in the offing and we went for it.” 

“The signs were very visible. Especially with formalisation and eCommerce and behaviour changes, there was a lot of opportunity. People are catching on but we still have not achieved scale. There is a lot more growth and space left,” Kazi explains. 

Kazi understands the risks of working at a startup but argues that the culture of innovation that is building in Pakistan presents a great opportunity for creating something meaningful. At Rozee especially, since it was a startup when startups were not even a thing in Pakistan, the culture of innovation is more vigorous. “The stakes are high but there is an enabling culture too. It’s moving in the right direction. Taking entrepreneurial initiatives comes with financial rewards as well as valuable experience.” 

 

Rubab graduated from the Lahore School of Economics in 2019 with a degree in marketing. Almost immediately after graduating, she got a job at a digital marketing agency and worked on some accounts for big clients. The work, however, was not quite as freeing and creative as she expected it to be.

“I had actually gotten into Pepsi’s Management Trainee Officer Programme. Back during our time at university, we used to do case studies and it seemed the only route to professional success and happiness was to join these large companies.I realised, however, after handling digital marketing accounts that there is very little freedom to do what you want. This is something I have a lot of passion for.” 

This is a reality of marketing jobs. A lot of talented, creative people such as Rubab go into it. But good ideas are very regularly dismissed or not taken up because of the vast bureaucracies that run big account corporations. That is why when Rubab received an offer from an edtech startup called Tabeer Academy, she decided to take the plunge. 

“When I joined, Tabeer had yet to be fully launched. It was my first experience at a startup and I was hired in the marketing department. I spent an entire year there and got a full first-hand experience and a chance to interact directly with the entire team. The product was still in the development stage, and we worked tirelessly on it. That is also where I got a feel for flexibility and having a voice,” she explains to Profit. 

“Startup roles are more empowering and there is a lot of room to make mistakes. The budgets are small, but you know how to be flexible and the learning curve is great in startups.”  

But then, Covid hit. For six months straight Rubab worked from home like everyone else. While she continued to work hard at Tabeer, she was not satisfied with the productivity she was achieving at home and wanted an environment where she could thrive again – so she actively started looking for opportunities that were not remote. 

“That’s when I got a call from Rozee. I was asked to come in for an interview for a marketing role. I found out they were actually hiring for Dukaan.PK. Since they knew I had a tech background, they chose me as their first employee. Rozee focuses on ecommerce and digitising small scale entrepreneurs. That was an interesting experience handling the marketing all on my own. Eventually, however, I got an offer from Colabs and moved there.” 

Colabs was another place where she realised that she wanted to be in the startup environment. Normally, if you join a bank or an MNC, you get pigeonholed into the role you begin with. Shifting from marketing to communications is difficult enough in a legacy company even though the two are linked – so shifting from something like marketing to product is nearly impossible. And while Rubab did not begin her stint at Colabs in marketing, that is where her passion lay and the Colabs leadership decided to give her a shot there. 

“I was at the Colabs marketing department for a few months and enjoyed my time there. Eventually, I got another offer from Educative – another edtech company and decided to move back to the sort of work I started with. I am now handling their online marketing.” 

 

One of the most prominent fintech startups in Pakistan, SadaPay, is gunning to build a robust digital financial services ecosystem for the banked, as well as the underbanked and the unbanked. As you’d be aware that for any organisation, cybersecurity is crucial for smooth running of operations. 

At SadaPay, the person at the helm of protecting data and smooth availability of all systems is Umair Aziz, whose yearning to build information security systems from ground up brought him into the startup world in 2021 after a long stint at legacy tech businesses. 

A graduate of the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad, Umair is one of the fortunate ones to have found a job while he was in college. “I started my career in 2011 with a local company handling their security projects. After that I moved on to Saudi Arabia and worked on national level projects as senior security analyst,” Umair recollects his memory of early days working in IT security. “In 2018, I moved to Dubai to work in a company that provided IT services to auto companies and right before Covid hit, I moved to EasyPaisa in their IT security department.”

From his prior experience, Umair could tell with certainty that at legacy companies working in a set way, flexing new ideas was not gladly received, that these corporate laggards would stifle his hunger for innovation and freedom to do things in the most fitting of ways. 

This moved the needle for Umair and he switched to SadaPay where decision makers were easily accessible, decision making was easy, and freedom of thought and initiative was welcomed. “The motive all this time has been to do things right from my own perspective,” Umair tells Profit. “I wanted to do things in a better way with more freedom and make a change, which brought me to SadaPay.” 

“If you work at a bank, you are not building anything; you’re steering an already afloat ship. But here, you have an opportunity to build foundations,” Umair says. “This is also why SadaPay’s success is personal to me.” 

Here, Umair was an active part of the team that got the electronic money institution (EMI) licence from the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP). SadaPay’s EMI licence was announced in April this year. “This was the team which really did it! I would never have had the experience of working on the regulations had I been working at a bank,” he tells Profit

It goes without saying though that while startups might look like a dazzling career choice, they are in fact very risky. Which is why the liberty to do things in one’s own way is perhaps the best way to get things done in the most efficient of ways. Before that, however, you need to be convinced that the idea that you are working around, convinces you as an employee. 

“There is obviously a risk to these career moves. It is a leap of faith you take in the system but also in the idea. When you come on board, you are buying into the idea first,” says Umair. 

 

An economics graduate from the Lahore School of Management Sciences, Saniya Sultan is the leader of the customer experience department at the B2B marketplace Dastgyr. At 25 years old, this is the second startup Saniya has had a pivotal role in shaping. 

“My degree was in economics, but that wasn’t where my talents or interest lay. I took a lot of marketing and business courses while I was at LUMS. When I was graduating, I did apply to some MNCs and legacy companies and that was definitely a route I was considering. I made it to the final round interviews at one company but didn’t make the cut. After that I had other decisions to wait for, but I got an offer from Swvl and didn’t want to wait any longer so I took it,” she tells Profit. 

From here, there was no looking back from Saniya. During her Junior year at LUMS, Saniya had interned at Careem and another startup based out of Plan9 in Lahore. So she already had a flavour for the sort of freedom and creativity that working at a startup offered. Cool-headed, concise, and possessing insights on the startup ecosystem beyond her years, Saniya is exactly the kind of fresh graduate that encapsulates the emerging talent we are trying to shed a light on. When asked why she chose to take a job at Swvl and then again at Dastgyr and stick by the startup route rather than go to a traditional legacy company, she poignantly put that in startups it is the people that matter, not the funding.  

“It is not about how much funding a startup has, it is about the people running it. If the founders and managers of a startup do not understand, for example, how to navigate a choppy economy like Pakistan, then it does not matter how good an idea is or how much funding that idea has behind it the startup will face trouble. Even when I joined Dastgyr, the one thing I looked at very carefully was the founders. I researched them, their work, and asked around about their reputation as managers. I got glowing reviews in response and that is why I decided to take on the job.” 

“Of course having great founders does not mean the business will always succeed. A lot of factors come into play here – the economy, the business model etc. It just means that they will get back up and build another business and work to succeed.”

This kind of insight is rare even in seasoned professionals. Coming from a 2019 graduate with two or three years of experience under her belt, it shows that a lot of these up and comers have a deep understanding of the environment in which they work. It is insight that has served Saniya well in her time at Swvl and Dastgyr. At Swvl, she started off as a customer experience executive. “That’s what I loved about the startup space. Immediately after being hired I was thrown into the deep end and I really got a flavour for having this kind of agency and responsibility. After setting up that department I shifted to sales which proved to be awesome exposure. I got promoted from there until eventually Dastgyr asked me to come in and lead their customer experience team.” 

This, as well, is a stand-out in the startup ecosystem. In most traditional companies, as we have mentioned before, moving between departments is a painful process. In this case, Saniya successfully moved from customer experience to sales and thrived in both roles. As a result, she now possesses skills in both fields and has doubled her portfolio. 

“I think the most important factor that gets you hooked to the startup culture is that you have no constraints. As an entry level executive, you have the opportunity to come up with and implement your vision. You are given a lot of responsibility but as a result a lot of freedom as well. The only constraints I can think of are budgetary, but even with those you have access to decision makers and can make a case for yourself – something that doesn’t happen in MNCs or other large companies,” she explains. 

“There are two parts to this, the first is the sense of ownership and the second is the faith that your company puts in you. At Dastgyr, I know I can form my own team and make calls. Plus everyone is so energetic and bouncing ideas off each other that we can actually take those ideas, experiment with them, execute them, and if they work even scale them. And if you get to that stage, you feel proud looking at something that is your brainchild.” 

 

What does working for the world’s biggest private employer teach you? In his time at Walmart, Taimoor Ali learned that at legacy corporate machines, it is impossible for employees to bring innovation and new-age thinking in business processes. 

Taimoor currently serves as COO at Pakistan’s leading online ticketing portal Bookme.pk. Before this, he had briefly founded his own startup in the early days of Pakistan’s startup ecosystem, and later had a stint at Walmart where he found that legacy corporations were not his speed. A 2012 graduate from Pakistan’s COMSATS University, entrepreneurship has driven him from an early age. . 

An enterprising individual with a knack for taking on mean problems, Taimoor took a crack at solving the energy problem for Pakistan and founded a renewable energy startup. “The ecosystem back then was not very conducive to new ideas,” Taimoor tells Profit.

From his first startup right after graduation, Taimoor moved to London for his MBA in Leadership and Strategy, following which he joined Walmart and had first-hand experience of how corporate bureaucracy works. “At Walmart, you’d be isolated from other departments and it would be years before you could get to know how things are done in collaboration with other departments. You are restricted to your JD,” says Taimoor. 

After his stint at Walmart and before Bookme, Taimoor worked at Lahore-based startup RepairDesk as product manager. “In startups, you have an overarching experience of how a business is run. How they become profitable,” Taimoor tells Profit. “You may be an IT guy but you get to start to learn about the business side as well. This eventually grooms your skills and you are an entrepreneur in the making.” 

Conclusion 

The startup ecosystem in Pakistan has done a lot for the country. It has introduced a spirit of innovation, it has brought funding to Pakistan, and it has created an entire system that is thriving and exciting people. The most important contribution of this ecosystem, however, is the people that it has raised. 

Young professionals get the freedom to enact brilliant ideas, and work in tandem with experienced individuals that have put their faith in this ecosystem. There are a lot of things in this ecosystem that need to be improved. It is not infallible. There is always room for improvement. But this in itself is an achievement that Pakistanis can be proud of. 

Highly skilled labour is a crucial pillar of the economy. The startup ecosystem has given it a boost. The stories of people like Fatima Mazhar and Usman Arshad inspire confidence in the people leading this ecosystem. The stories of up-and-comers like Saniya Sultan and Meiryum Ali give hope for the generations that will eventually inherit this ecosystem. 

Perhaps one of the most significant signs that this is an ecosystem promoting good work culture is the presence of a large number of women that are gaining prominence in this space – something this week’s second editorial points towards. All in all, it is a heartening revolution to witness. We are all for it, and hope it will grow and become better than ever. 

Source: https://profit.pakistantoday.com.pk/2022/07/09/in-pakistan-the-startup-ecosystem-fosters-an-elite-group-of-professionals/

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How to run a startup like a true leader!

Running a startup requires a figure known as a “team leader”, who possesses a great number of skills and is capable of carrying out a project against all odds.By following these 8 guidelines, you will be able to lead your team like a true leader:

CONFIDENCE

Confidence is fundamental for a leader; the more confident he or she is, the stronger and more motivated the team will feel. The passion with which he or she works is contagious, thus leading the team to follow the startup’s path to success. According to studies, positive thinking promotes a healthy team mentality.

ORGANIZE TASKS

The key to everything is organization. A good work team is one that always maintains good communication and includes each of its members when planning tasks, thus promoting teamwork. It is important to note that to do this, the leader must have a clear vision of where he/she wants to go and the ultimate goal of the project.

BEING RESPONSIBLE

Assuming commitments and responding to everything that happens in the project is key in the figure of a leader. A responsible leader acts selflessly and in the interest of the team, always making judgments based on facts and data collected rather than jumping to conclusions.

LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN

Great leaders accept challenges, criticisms and points of view different from their own. Being like this allows them to develop the value of trust with the team, and even helps them not only to detect any kind of inconvenience or problem that affects the performance of workers, but also to generate new benefits for workers.

PROMOTE VALUES

It’s important to have a clear vision of where you want to go and, at the same time, to have an organizational culture based on shared values with the team. Listening and talking to all team members allows you to understand what their needs are and, in turn, helps to create the ideal space for them to work at ease, feeling not only identified, but also committed to the company.

KEEP GOOD COMMUNICATION

Undoubtedly, a key factor in any project is communication. Part of good communication stems from the ability to do so in a clear, direct, and empathetic manner. As a leader, it is important to know how to communicate, but also to maintain fluid communication among the rest of the team so that any type of work is developed in the best possible way, thus avoiding errors or misunderstandings.

SET TIMES

As a leader it is necessary to find a way to make things happen in the best possible way. Establishing objectives and timelines for each project serves as a guide to measure if they are on track. However, it is important to know how to detect the precise moments to exert pressure and remain firm, but also to be sensitive enough to be flexible enough to consider setbacks such as changes in organizational dynamics, replacements in the team, or personal issues of any of the members.

MOTIVATE AND INSPIRE

A leader inspires his or her team with enthusiasm and passion. This makes people feel valued and know their strengths and needs. A motivated leader recognizes the value of hard work and stimulates the potential of his employees through meaningful challenges and goals that help them to improve themselves both personally and professionally.

Based on this series of guidelines, which complement each other, and putting them into practice, a better relationship with the team can be achieved, and therefore, better results in the work of each one of them, thus leading to the success of the startup.

Source: https://bcombinator.com/how-to-run-a-startup-like-a-true-leader
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Why your innovation experiments fail

Experimentation and validation are necessary to de-risk your innovation process – but the methods are not bulletproof. After collaborating with and running validation for multiple global business leaders, we’ve put together a list of the most common experimentation mistakes and how to avoid them.

Preventing unsuccessful experiments

1. Think measurables

When outlining an experiment, it’s good to focus on the ‘what’. But it’s just as vital to be able to measure the outcome of the experiment. With a North Star Metric, you’ll be setting a single metric at the beginning of your experiment. It’ll be your guide when gauging the outcomes based on what you wish to achieve.

WHY WE DO THIS

You want to know where you’re going before you start walking. A descriptive set of milestones can help you sketch what this metric will look like. You can use our Experiment Card to outline a North Star Metric based on your own validation goals. 

While working on one of our most recent projects, we wanted to determine whether buyers understood the message of the product. To analyze consumer understanding, we developed a 5-second test. In this case, the North Star Metric represented the comprehension rate. We asked those who took the test what they thought the product did, and then measured the number of people who gave a correct answer within the five-second time frame.

2. Define clear success criteria

Setting clear success criteria is yet another vital step some innovation teams are known to leave behind. Essentially, this step is about discussing the metric values your North Star Metric will analyze, and ultimately measure the experiment as a success or failure. To set it in motion, you’ll need the ability to kill or pivot your validation methods.

WHY WE DO THIS

Setting up the right criteria throughout all phases of experimentation will help you determine if, and why, an experiment is considered a success. Make sure to design your North Star Metric with all team members to bring clarity to your process.

Bonus tip! Most information can be reused. Data from past experiments often serves as a benchmark for future validation processes. Don’t despair if you’re working towards your first experiment, a Google search can always provide existing benchmarks you can set as your own.

One of our B2B clients used LinkedIn messaging as a validation technique, and operated it as a tool to check if their offer raised any interest. After running an experiment with them, we noticed that out of 63 sent messages, they had only received five positive replies. In the end, this collected data wasn’t relevant, because they hadn’t defined how many responses would be considered a success.

3. Don’t rush into it

Control is one of the many advantages of digital validation experiments. These can be conducted quickly, enabling teams to gather consumer or end-user data in a matter of days. But like all good things, there’s always a downside. More often than not, teams hurry towards the experimentation phase believing speed is the only factor to take into account. Although digital experiments usually offer faster outcomes, rushing into them will mostly result in inconclusive data insights. You might’ve already noticed the connection between the North Star Metric, a clear success criteria, and a thinking-before-doing approach. These first three steps to avoid experimentation malfunction are usually set in motion hand-in-hand. 

WHY WE DO THIS

To avoid putting effort in results we can’t use, we always take into account a data modelling basic principle: garbage in = garbage out. You should too. To avoid hasty mistakes and irrelevant information, our mindset is to always choose data quality over fast execution. Reverse engineering from desired results is a good starting point to set up these types of experiments.

While trying to harness the speed this type of experiments provide, we’ve had clients coming up with ideas they want to test in less than a day of work. Without diving into the nitty gritty aspects of the experiment, setting tests in this narrow time frame would only offer ineffective outcomes.

4. Avoid short-term learning memory

Experiments provide consumer insights based on real market data, showing which route to take next in your project. But information saturation is never helpful. Conducting more experiments than are needed may end up tangling up results with other quantitative and qualitative research sources. This ends up diluting the value of the insights. Having clear takeaways and revisiting compiled data can help you avoid the common pitfall of not making the most out of the information that’s already available.

WHY WE DO THIS

We avoid wasting assets, and make the most of the data we already have. It is usually not single-use.

By conducting an experiment for a maternity product, we discovered only 3 out of 12 features had a high positive response. Based on more research, a new feature was proposed. However, revisiting the previous experiment outcomes led to killing this proposal before putting it to the test.

Tool tip! For a project, we used the Miro tool to create an experimental war-room with easy access to the team. All participated in outlining experiment setups, goals, results overviews, learnings, and future steps to follow. This granted all team members quick access to past experiment results that would come in handy in the future.

Experimentation war room for a project

5. Don’t fall in love with your idea

Successful validation experiments depend on unbiased teams. What’s the point of running a test in the first place otherwise? When conducting trials, it’s important to look out for confirmation bias, as well as the human tendency to look for information that confirms one’s beliefs. A good way to keep track of assumptions is listing them and designing an experiment around them. However, you have to be willing to be proved wrong! Experiments are not set to confirm preferences or reflect your team’s presumptions, they’re meant to give you a glimpse of what end-users and consumers want.

WHY WE DO THIS

Avoiding biases creates a learning-prone mindset, much needed in innovation teams. All who are part of these processes should be prepared to have their ideas debunked, to learn from unexpected results, pivot around testing outcomes, and to re-define their success criteria as much as it takes.

One of our clients in the food and beverage industry conducted groundbreaking scientific research on a product. Our job was to validate the data. We underwent a testing phase, intended to analyze the product’s relevance amongst a target audience. We led an experiment prioritizing one of the product’s features, and actually discovered a more relevant one. The team was caught off guard when realizing their initial assumption wasn’t as prominent as they had thought it would be. Because of their initial expectations, they decided to run the experiment more than once, but the results stayed the same.
Sample output of feature experimentation

6. Draw a line between business rationale and desirability metrics

You might’ve heard of soft and hard key performance indicators (KPIs). When setting up validation experiments, we like to split them up. Soft metrics measure values such as impressions, reach, and engagement; and sometimes even click-through-rate. Despite being hard measurables, these are called vanity metrics. Why? They make you feel good, but they don’t reach conversion. Although these metrics do show desirability insights, they’re not where the business is at. Conversion rates, cost per sale, cost per qualified lead, and acquired customers. These are the hard metrics that reflect direct value, so they need to take on the spotlight.

WHY WE DO THIS

It’s not one or the other. Paying attention to all kinds of metrics while focusing on the ones that reflect conversion rates is possible. Map out the metrics that show real end-user value for specific stages of the project, and pay attention to hard metrics in the viability stage. You can also focus on soft metrics when analyzing desirability. The goal is to reach a robust analytics structure that uses all these values the right way.

Different audiences have different behaviors throughout digital channels. 50+ target users have significantly higher click rates on Facebook compared to a younger audience. While using landing pages to contrast each audience’s conversion rate, we find the older users present similar (sometimes even higher) engagement than younger generations. The soft metrics show favorable engagement of the older users, but ultimately, the conversion rates lean towards the younger ones.

7. Avoid force-fitting tools

Tools aren’t just a hype. An elaborate toolbox facilitates effective validation experiments. UsabilityHubPhantombuster, and Umso are a few examples of widgets with pretty awesome functionalities for experimentation. Each tool comes with its own strengths and weaknesses, which outlines an ideal scenario to use them respectively. This is why it’s important to choose the tool that better fits your specific learning goals, and not the other way around.

WHY WE DO THIS

We want our capital and time investment to be more efficient. Avoiding using tools without a specific need helps us get there. By creating an overview of your toolbox, your team will always be mindful of the right time to  implement them. You can take a look at our experiment picker flowchart. This is a nifty tool that helps you set up the right experiments for the validation you need, and makes it easier to pick your tools accordingly.

We have a good example of tool usage. Recently, a client of ours received a message from their legal department – a new tool had been approved for their use. This turned into a recurring topic, the main focus being the client wanting to implement this tool into their experimentation processes. We found ourselves still in the discovery phase of the project. At the time, the new tool wasn’t suitable, it would come in handy at a later testing stage. Although it is always important to be aware of potential tools, you shouldn’t aim at using them just for the sake of their implementation.

It’s go time

We experiment because validating ideas and assumptions through experimentation provides the means to increase your product’s market-fit. Taking into account these tips to avoid an experiment malfunction, you’ll have a safety net around your validation processes, and will virtually  increase your chances of success.

Source: https://www.boardofinnovation.com/blog/why-your-innovation-experiments-fail/

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Pakistan’s Startup Ecosystem Is ready for lift off now, CEO Ignite

2021 has been a remarkable year for Pakistani startups as far as investments are concerned. In the whole of 2020, Pakistani startups had received an investment of $77 million whereas in just 8 months of 2021, investments in Pakistani startups have crossed $228 million according to Ignite. That is a growth of almost 3 times over 2020 with another 4 months still to go. If the momentum continues like this for the next couple of years, annual investments in Pakistani startups can reach billion dollars by 2025.

According to CEO Ignite, Asim Shahryar Husain, “Over the last five years or more, government, academia, and industry have launched many incubators which have produced more than a thousand startups in different verticals. Many of these startups are generating revenue and are ready for acceleration. When you have leading VCs like Kleiner Perkins and 20VC investing in Pakistani startups, then it means that you are getting ready for the global stage. Pakistani startups are the next big thing and many are ready for acceleration and lift-off now.”

Ignite is planning both horizontal and vertical expansion of its flagship National Incubation Centers (NICs) in future. Presently, Ignite has launched NICs in Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, and Quetta. In future, Ignite will be launching new incubators in Faisalabad, Hyderabad, Multan and other cities of Pakistan. Also, Ignite will launch specialized incubators in verticals such as gaming & animation, aerospace, healthtech, etc. for incubation of startups in these areas.

Sectors which are attracting investment include ecommerce, transport/logistics, fintech, healthech, retailtech, and edtech. So far, 37 Pakistani startups have raised funding of $228 million this year. Five of them have raised more than $10 million dollars each including Airlift (ecommerce), Cheetay (logistics), Tajir (retailtech), Educative (edtech), and Finja (fintech) in series A and series B funding this year. A shift towards series A and B funding by many startups shows that they are growing and planning national and international expansion of their operations. Average deal size has grown by more than 3 times from $1.2 million in 2020 to around $4 million this year.

Leading international venture capitalists which have invested in Pakistani startups this year include Kleiner Perkins, Prosus, 20VC, Buckley Ventures, Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Next Billion Ventures, SparkLabs, Golden Gate Ventures, Hustle Fund, First Round Capital, Draper Associates, Global Founders Capital, Raptor Group, MSA Capital, Shorooq Partners, Visa, and Stripe. Leading local investors include Indus Valley Capital, Fatima Gobi Ventures, 47 Ventures, KASB Securities, BitRate, Invest2Innovate, Zayn Capital, Sarmayacar, HBL Ventures, and Systems Limited. So Pakistani startups are attracting investment from all over the globe.

What are the factors which are attracting investment in Pakistani startups this year? After Covid-19 situation since last year, many governments have released funds to stimulate economies and venture capitalists are flush with cash looking around for good investment opportunities. Second, State Bank of Pakistan has issued some useful regulations regarding startups such as sweat equity and convertible debt which has resulted in boosting foreign investment in startups. Pakistan’s banking regulator has allowed shareholding of Pakistani founders in foreign holding companies of startups in the form of sweat equity. Third, Pakistan is a 200 million plus consumer market and ecommerce for groceries, household related items, and food delivery has flourished after Covid lockdowns.

At present, majority of the investments in Pakistani startups is by foreign investors. If tax incentives are given by FBR to local investors such as tax credit on investments in local startups, then it will trigger local investment in startups also. If investments continue pouring in like this, then valuations of mature startups will continue to rise and Pakistan could see its first unicorn (billion dollar startup) before 2025.

Reference: https://ignite.org.pk/pakistans-startup-ecosystem-is-ready-for-lift-off-now-ceo-ignite/
https://www.daraz.pk/products/a-deep-dive-into-pakistans-startup-ecosystem-i4026334.html

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What is a local innovation ecosystem?

Completing the circuit

So what is a local innovation ecosystem, anyway?

To me, it’s a little like electricity. Let’s say a person has a great idea – we’ll call that the light bulb. When turned on, it can light up a room. But here’s the problem: a light bulb can’t shine on its own. To light up, it needs all sorts of circuitry: connecting wires, a power source, switches, capacitors, and resistors. Without these critical components, the light bulb stays dark, and the idea never reaches the people who need it.

IDIN’s work for the last four years has shown us that there is no shortage of light bulbs. In every community on the planet, people are coming up with creative ideas to solve the problems they face. But too often, the circuitry may not be there to support that idea. Maybe there is no local capital to invest in new businesses, or policies make it difficult to patent an invention. Maybe schools focus on rote learning rather than hands-on problem solving, discouraging youth from exploring new solutions. Or maybe the right people simply aren’t connected to each other.

We’re learning how to complete the circuit. These teams from around the world have a wealth of lessons to share. And if electricity has taught us anything, it’s this: when the circuitry is robust and resilient, it doesn’t just power one light bulb. It can light up a whole city.

A working definition

This has us really excited. We are beginning to dream of a world in which people work together in vibrant, inclusive, and resilient local innovation ecosystems to tackle and solve development challenges.

Our understanding of local innovation ecosystems is evolving every day, as IDIN’s research program explores deep questions and the innovators in the IDIN Network tackle challenges on the front lines. With their help, here is the definition that we have come up with so far:

A local innovation ecosystem is an enabling environment and infrastructure that allows people to engage in iterative processes of innovation and problem solving to generate solutions to local challenges and deliver them to the people who need them.

This definition breaks down into four parts:

1. Enabling Environment: An innovation ecosystem is built on the local institutions, conditions, structures that support innovation. This enabling environment can include educational opportunities in design and innovation, local capital to support innovation and entrepreneurship, physical and virtual spaces for problem-solving, and ways to connect within and across ecosystems.

2. Broad Engagement with Innovation: In a thriving local innovation ecosystem, diverse individuals and institutions can access skills and tools for problem-solving, collaborate with each other, obtain feedback, iterate, learn, and share with others.

3. Solution Development: In a healthy local innovation ecosystem, innovators and entrepreneurs assess social needs, develop products and services to address these needs, and iteratively evaluate and improve these solutions.

4. Solution Delivery: An effective local innovation ecosystem delivers solutions to those who need them.

Crowdsourcing a vision

It’s a start, but we stand to be corrected. That’s the whole point of this trip: for the next two weeks, we’ll be listening and learning from local champions who have tangible examples of ecosystem success and failure. Together, we will start to untangle the complexities, identify the gaps, and refine our collective vision.

We started learning even before we took off. Yesterday, I asked everyone to answer the following question. Here were some of the responses:

“A local innovation ecosystem should….”

  • “…engage diverse stakeholders – from educational institutions, to community groups, to government, and business.”
  • “…include resources for people to gain the skills/knowledge they lack. It should also consist of a pool of resources for everyone to access.”
  • “…comprise relevant and innovative interventions, engaging beneficiaries and all stakeholders needed to keep it sustainable.”

Pulling key words from just these three quotes, we get new insights into a local innovation ecosystem’s components, qualities, and actions.

  • Components: Stakeholders. Resources. Interventions. Skills. Knowledge.
  • Qualities: Diverse. Sustainable. Innovative. Relevant.
  • Actions: Engage. Gain. Access. Include.

Reference: https://www.idin.org/blog-news-events/blog/what-local-innovation-ecosystem

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The 3 Core Elements of an Innovation Ecosystem

The Framework to Develop an Innovation Capability within a Large Organization

Developing an innovation capability within a large organization is a daunting prospect. In the past, many have tried but few succeeded. Often difficulties are linked to a too narrow and shallow approach, such as training a group of employees in an innovation methodology and expecting the organization to turn into an innovation powerhouse as a consequence. It’s become clear in the last few years that building a sustainable innovation capability requires a more systemic approach. With our clients, we use the term innovation ecosystem to help leaders take a wider, more systemic, approach to building an innovation capability.

But what is an innovation ecosystem?

In this post, we introduce the three elements leaders need to build a thriving innovation ecosystem in their organization.


Innovation ecosystem =

Explore portfolio+Innovation programs+Exploration culture


Explore Portfolio

Definition: Your Portfolio of innovation projects, new business models, new value propositions, and new products and services, all mapped out in terms of Expected Return and Innovation Risk.

To better understand the Explore portfolio of an organization we also sort projects in the portfolio according to the three types of innovation: efficiency, sustaining and transformative innovation. This helps assess if the portfolio balance is aligned with the strategic objectives of the organization, or if adjustments to the innovation ecosystem are required.

Another important aspect we consider here is the innovation framework.

Definition: Your innovation framework consists of the process, business rules, governance, etc. that you put in place to manage your Explore portfolio.

In the below visual you can see an innovation framework geared towards transformative innovation that we use as a starting point for the design of a customized framework with our clients. We help leaders design and implement the innovation framework that’s best adapted to their portfolio objectives.

GrowthPortfolio - FINAL TEMPLATE.001

Innovation Programs

Definition: Innovation Programs are all programs taking place within the organization that are related to innovation and aim to create value (i.e. revenue/profit), change the culture (i.e. structure/processes) or do both.

This article lists the 10 most common corporate innovation programs.

In our client work we use the Innovation Ecosystem Map to Assess how your Innovation Programs are Performing.

 

We map existing innovation programs in a company on this map to identify if those programs, and the resource allocation they get, are aligned with the strategic objectives of the organization, or if adjustments are required to improve the overall innovation ecosystem.

Exploration Culture

Definition: Your exploration culture cultivates the creation, discovery, validation and acceleration of completely new ideas that are foreign to an organization.

We use the culture map to visualize the exploration culture, and assess enablers and blockers in the most critical categories of leadership support, organizational design and innovation practice.

This helps us identify quickly the blockers that could derail innovation efforts, design culture interventions to overcome them and put in place the enablers for a sustainable and thriving innovation ecosystem. 

So what makes your innovation ecosystem?

It’s the unique combination of an Explore portfolio that is managed the right way, plus your innovation programs and your company culture.

Like any complex living system, it doesn’t mature overnight and is always in flux, adapting to the changes in your business environment, evolving in line with your strategy to respond to those new threats and opportunities.

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To drive innovation, you must understand your ecosystem

In 1878 Leo Tolstoy released what would become one of his most acclaimed works, the novel ‘Anna Karenina‘. The book started with a quote that over the centuries has transcended disciplines: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’.

When taken literally, the quote is a good reflection on family life and family conduct. But as a metaphor, the quote has found application in different fields, from anthropology to ecology, and from philosophy now to business.

The quote became the Anna Karenina Principle, with its popularisation by Jared Diamond in his book ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’. In the book, the principle illustrates why – throughout human history – so few wild animals have been successfully domesticated. A deficiency in any one of a high number of factors can render a species not able to be tamed. Therefore, all successfully domesticated species are not so because of a particular positive trait, but because of a lack of any number of possible negative characteristics. The Anna Karenina Principle can be summed up as: a deficiency in any one of several factors dooms an endeavour to failure – consequently, a successful effort (subject to this principle) is one where every possible deficiency has been avoided or overcome.

With more and more businesses understanding the importance of building innovation ecosystems to ensure sustainable future growth, the Anna Karenina Principle comes to the forefront again in the context of improving or changing these ecosystems.

An innovation ecosystem consists of many elements, all of which need to work in sync for growth to happen. Through our pioneering work around innovation maturity, we’ve concluded that when clustering the many ecosystem elements, you typically end up with five core pillars: strategy, leadership, management, culture and processes. Understanding if any of the components of these pillars is hindering the progress and outcome of the ecosystem becomes paramount when it comes to making improvements or changes. Think of the ecosystem improvement strategy in terms of a sat-nav system in a car. Sat-nav systems are great when they work, but there are times when the link is down, the signal fails, or the reading is off, and the journey can turn into a random game of mystery-road pinball. Or to put it another way, you know where you want to get to, but unless your starting point is clear then any proposed route and any stops along the way are simply guesswork, or in innovation parlance, unproven assumptions!

The same applies when it comes to improving an innovation ecosystem. Unless you are clear on your current starting point, then your roadmap to developing the organisation’s innovation ecosystem and thus maturity will at best be packed with assumptions, and at worst will actively prevent further development.

To illustrate this point, imagine an ecosystem where individual intrapreneurs are too afraid to propose a new idea for fear of being punished by senior leaders. The result is a direct limit to the number of ideas submitted, which will impact the company’s growth in the years to come. This is a clear cultural blocker that needs addressing before making any further investment. If this blocker is not flagged early on, any investment in capability development, for example, will be money poured down the drain. Or another example, if the C-level can’t agree on a clear strategy, the investments are likely to be random. Again, this strategy blocker will have dire implications for the company’s future. Therefore creating, for example, a corporate venture capital fund before developing a clear innovation strategy won’t yield expected results as investments will not be deliberate acts or strategically aligned.

When it comes to improving an ecosystem, another critical aspect to understand is that just doubling down on something that’s already working will not increase outcomes and, in certain situations, may even result in something to the contrary happening. Hence all elements of the ecosystem need to be not just in sync, but equally mature. For example, merely increasing the R&D budget won’t pay off if another factor holds this variable back.

There is no statistically significant relationship between how much a company spends on its innovation efforts and its sustained financial performance’, states a Price Waterhouse Cooper research paper. A testament to which is the discrepancy that’s evident when you put Boston Consulting Group’s list of the Top 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World next to Statista’s Top 20 R&D Spenders in the World. Only three of the top ten spenders are in the top ten innovators.

To understand the maturity of each element making up an ecosystem, one first needs to understand the difference between attributes and outputs. For an analogy: should one be considered mature because they brush their teeth and look smart at work or because they are emotionally well developed and bring thoughtful and reasoned arguments to the benefit of the organisation, its people and customers? Outward appearances don’t always reveal what is going on inside; so, measuring random ‘things’ rather than attributes won’t help you unpack and define what is truly going on. When you take ‘things’ away, what remains is a complex interaction between the five pillars of the ecosystem. Drawing those strands together produces an innovation maturity dashboard that, used correctly, informs and guides the creation of an aligned roadmap of required interventions and hence, the progress of the organisation.

The maturity of an ecosystem can be divided into many levels, but from our experience, we’ve found that four levels work best.

Four levels of maturity
Novice Just because an organisation is at the novice end of the spectrum doesn’t mean that there is no innovation activity. On the contrary, there might be little spurts of ad-hoc activity in one or more departments and innovation may occasionally be discussed amongst the leadership team. But discussion is typically as far as it gets. With no leadership sponsorship and no innovation strategy, any positive outcomes are likely to be accidental rather than designed and generally low value.
Competent This level requires not only cultural change but also a sea change in the leadership approach. At this level, leaders now recognise the need for innovation as a driver of required outcomes. To this end, they have likely developed a basic innovation strategy and are prepared to sponsor innovation, albeit at a limited level. Some innovation training has usually taken place, and the organisation will likely have looked to incorporate essential innovation tools into the mix. However, organisations at this level still typically focus on short-term outcomes, and there is a fair chance that the innovation strategy and corporate strategy remain misaligned. That’s certainly not the case for the third level.
Expert Attaining this new level of maturity sees a cultural and leadership shift from regarding innovation as an add-on to recognising it as an intrinsic driver of growth across the organisation. There is still some way to go, but at least innovation is now aligned to the core strategy with visible leadership sponsorship of innovation activity. At this level innovative ideas are starting to spread across the organisation, becoming embedded in product and process design as well as influencing and informing how teams and projects are managed. Admittedly the focus remains on mid-term goals, but on the positive side, a suite of innovation tools alongside defined metrics and KPIs is starting to enable activity across the innovation mix.
Leader This fourth and highest level is achieved when preparation ends, and the full innovation journey begins. Innovation is no longer just aligned with the strategy. Instead, it is an intrinsic part of the strategy and fully embedded into organisational culture. Metrics and KPIs are fully integrated and deliver a realistic and rounded picture of organisational capability, thereby enabling product and process development to be focused on delivering innovation-led outcomes. There is also full leadership sponsorship alongside the development of a core innovation team. Together these help to transform business management, building innovation engagement and enabling people to innovate without fear of failure. This, in turn, moves the organisation’s viewpoint away from short-termism and towards the attainment of long-term goals.

Leadership matters

A specific leadership culture is needed to achieve the fourth and highest level of innovation maturity. If we assume that innovation is baked into organisational culture, along with the tools of measurement to gauge its progress, the challenge of leading in that environment remains. In far too many instances, this is where efforts to build innovation ecosystems break down and fail to deliver on the innovation investment promise. Or, put another way, it is at this stage that many organisations put the wrong people into positions of leadership.

Innovation is still primarily viewed as a technical accomplishment that requires leaders with strong technical skills. And while that may be true – your leaders certainly need to know the nuts and bolts of any specific project – it is not enough on its own to deliver on the final vision. Effective leadership today requires an expert-level grasp of both hard and soft leadership skills.

What do we mean by soft skills? Increasingly, leadership development visionaries are pushing for a more holistic view of the skills necessary to motivate and engage employees, particularly when they are involved in a specific project with particular expectations and goals. Leading for innovation is about demonstrating a full range of skills that could be captured under the broad label of ’emotional intelligence’ (EI), a hot commodity now among leadership development gurus.

EI has a broad and still evolving definition and can include everything from extensive and effective communication, cross-disciplinary collaboration and building a sense of community. However, there is a consensus around the need to develop more complex skills like empathy and compassion. Although they can be developed in most leaders, these are generally not included in the natural skill set of many strong technical leaders. The result is a significant gap between an organisation coming up with ideas (inventing) and executing and implementing those ideas (innovating). Bridging that gap is often the missing element in many promising projects that stumble before they come to fruition.

Applying liberal doses of empathy and compassion, even in the development of a purely technical challenge, has many different benefits. First, it makes it much more likely that an innovation team will reach its goal and bridge the gap between idea and execution. Leaders able to apply high levels of EI to their project oversight usually find the right outcome arrives on-budget and on-time more often and with a much higher degree of buy-in from the team. EI-driven leaders are also more likely to assemble a team that operates by consensus and mutual support. However, organisations that instil EI across all leadership levels also benefit from much broader and deeper engagement and acceptance of innovation by employees, greatly reducing the possibility that new innovative ideas developed by one team are resisted by the rest of the organisation.

Gauging an ecosystem’s maturity

The best way to gauge an ecosystem’s maturity and needs is to apply a company-wide survey asking multiple-choice questions about every subsection of each of the five pillars. For example, questions around the ecosystem’s leadership could be along the lines of:

  • Our leadership team provides the right support and resources to deliver on our company’s innovation goals and ambitions.
  • Our leadership team is consistent in putting words into action around innovation.
  • There is clear and visible leadership ownership and sponsorship for innovation.

For statistical accuracy, a review of this kind needs to be distributed both vertically and horizontally across the organisation. Note that to get a statistically accurate (within an agreed margin) high-resolution picture of what the ecosystem needs, the survey doesn’t need to be taken by everyone in the company. As long as it gets to a cross-section of people both horizontally and vertically, there is usually no need to get participation from more than 10% of the ecosystem.

For increased accuracy, you can combine the survey data with an analysis of the ecosystem’s outcomes. If the findings from the survey can explain the shortcomings in the outcomes, now the ecosystem’s needs are clear.

In a nutshell if one wants to improve an existing ecosystem, a continuous improvement process is made up of the following five steps:

  1. Assess the current state of the ecosystem using both the survey method and analysis of its outcomes.
  2. Understand the limiting factors or blockers of the ecosystem – the things that hinder the ecosystem’s level of maturity and its outcomes.
  3. Tackle the blockers with appropriate actions (e.g. leadership development, process improvement initiatives, cultural transformation)
  4. Re-measure the ecosystem once the steps have been deployed to evaluate the level of expected change.
  5. Re-do the loop every time the ecosystem needs improvement.

Successful innovation requires more than just process transformation; it calls for the entire ecosystem to have an innovative ethos and be equipped to tackle the challenges of today and the unfolding opportunities of tomorrow. This includes the need to have an appropriate HR strategy, a proper structure, demonstrable executive-level support, and a culture built around the pursuit of innovation. All this also built around a core purpose and a deep-rooted desire to pursue better. Action to improve any ecosystem shouldn’t be taken until the current situation is fully understood. So, analysis of the ecosystem needs to have the full support of the executive team if it is to uncover the ecosystem blockers preventing the company from achieving its growth goals.

Making sure your family is a happy one is not a matter of luck nor will, but a matter of understanding the particular needs of your family. In the same way, developing your innovation ecosystem cannot be done by observing another company’s innovation strategy, capability or culture. Assessing your ecosystem should be the first step before any improvement measures are taken as they need to be specific to your ecosystem and your ecosystem alone.

Reference: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/10/29/to-drive-innovation-you-must-understand-your-ecosystem/

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The 4 Main Ways to Innovate in a Digital Economy

Over the last 20 years, digital design and collaboration tools have fundamentally altered how firms approach innovation. In the pre-digital era, product and service development was usually conducted by experts working inside firms or through expert vendors hired by those firms.

Today, aided by digital design and  fabrication tools on the one hand and social networking communities and collaboration/sharing  tools on the other, an expanded “innovation landscape” is marked by new forms of participation and ownership, with new participants entering new markets and new arrangements of collective innovation.

The good news, of course, is that this expanded landscape creates an opportunity-rich environment for firms to innovate. The bad news is that these opportunities also create some new challenges. Managers need a framework for navigating this new landscape and harnessing the power of these new tools.

To help make sense of the opportunities and challenges ahead, we have identified four distinct innovation modes. Each mode is characterized by its own set of stakeholders and interaction dynamics, along with specific ways that companies can achieve a competitive advantage.

The specialist mode

In the specialist mode, companies will create new products and services by pushing the envelope of product performance, with improvements allowed by digital design. In this mode, high-risk, high-reward projects are typically developed and commercialized by formal organizations, using either hierarchy (in-house) or markets (out-sourced) as organizing mechanisms. Companies such as Volkswagen, Boeing, IBM, and Apple are active in this mode.

One challenges with the specialist mode is that companies must build these technical capabilities in-house to prevent imitation from competitors; to attract and retain top talent; and to maintain process rigor in the an era of increasing design churn. Tesla’s effort to develop its battery Gigafactory is an example of a specialist developing internal capabilities for competitive advantage.

The venture mode

The venture mode expands the flexibility and speed with which innovators act. These can be individuals inside corporations, but also entrepreneurs, tinkerers, and do-it-yourselfers who tend to assemble the necessary resources by using intermediate services which provide access to specialized tools and skills. Advancements in digital design tools have drastically lowered the entry barriers and allowed many more to participate in this mode. For managers of more established firms, this mode can allow small, entrepreneurial teams to develop new product and service ideas and test them at low cost. These internal “startup” teams can help seed traditional concept funnels with ideas that are more advanced in terms of design and concept testing than traditional methods.

One challenge for firms active in the venture mode is to quickly identify, select, and assemble necessary resources.  These markets are often moving fast, and the ability to protect the business through intellectual property is often limited, so the most powerful competitive advantage is high velocity.

The community mode

The third mode of the new innovation landscape attracts large numbers of new entrants due to the low barriers of entry and includes — at least in part — a trust-based form of organizing. For this reason we label this the community mode. Similar to open innovation, the setting of organizational and decision-making boundaries becomes substantially “fuzzy” as collaborating with like-minded strangers becomes an integral part for some business models. The spectacular rise and fall of Quirky, Inc., one of the first social product development companies, is an example of this mode. The opportunities for firms operating in this mode are potentially new forms of market development and user engagement. New ideas and closer ties with consumers can be the result of open innovation efforts.

Managers operating in the community mode need to understand the challenges of maintaining, incentivizing, and capturing true value-added contributions from these communities.  If the opinion of 1,000,000 community members has to be considered, for example, then the decision-making authority of the firm is more constrained.

The network mode

The network mode is characterized by the high performance product design expertise seen in specialist firms with trust-based sharing behavior typical of communities and close vendor networks. The opportunity in this mode lies in the chance to build an innovation system where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Bringing together the expertise from a wide range of disciplines and geographies, supported and enabled by advanced digital tools, allows the emergence of entirely new solutions, potentially one which would never emerge in traditional organizational set-ups. Rearranging organizational boundaries and new incentive structures are part of this opportunity.

The challenges lie in how to successfully develop and manage the processes, which requires more coordination due to the greater levels of complexity. Building social norms, ensuring sufficient overlap, or at least information flow between designer and user communities, and orchestrating the actual work are no easy tasks.

Source: https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-4-main-ways-to-innovate-in-a-digital-economy

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