The event is over with participaiton from over 60 campers. Here's the brief of the event.
For more on WiCamp: contact Pavan Soni (pavan.soni@wipro.com)
Theme: Fostering Creativity
When: May 16, 2008
Where:
Wipro Technologies Campus, Hyderabad
Sponsor
WiCamp which stands for Wipro’s Innovation Camp is inspired by the silicon-valley styled BarCamps which are un-conference like meetings. Here like minded people come over and share their learning on a topic of mutual interest through presentation, demos, videos, etc.
16th May, Hyderabad: Wipro’s Hyderabad Campus saw its first ever WiCamp at the Sunflower Amphitheatre, Madhapur DC. WiCamp (pronounced as we-camp) is Wipro’s Innovation Camp and is aimed at staging un-conference styled gatherings sharing practices on innovation and creativity. Around the theme of “Fostering Creativity”, WiCamp witnessed over 60 associates from Wipro and other leading firms. The key intent of a WiCamp is to infuse heterogeneity of thoughts and perspectives, by design. In ensuring so, speakers aka, “campers” are invited from a diverse set of firms and institutions. At the Hyderabad WiCamp, this list included Qualcomm, Intense Technologies, International School of Business, Sreenidhi College, ADP Technologies, and MeritTrac, among others.
Here’s a brief on the event and an invitation to the upcoming WiCamp at Pune on 30th May 2008. I, on behalf of the Innovation Council, invite you for the same and also seeking your help in garnering support for the event from outside Wipro, in terms of speakers.
Styles of Learning Fostering Creativity
The first presentation of the day came from Hrishi Mohan, an enthusiastic Wiproite who shared his experiments on peoples’ learning styles inspired by Kolbe’s Model. Classifying learning styles driven by Active Experimentation, Reflective Observation, Concrete Experience, and Abstract Conceptualization; Hrishi argued that fostering creativity would mean encouraging teams and individuals to involve in active experimentation as well abstract conceptualization. The presentation spiraled into a discussion on the experiences people had with varied styles of learning and what best suites innovation at its various stages. A good start to the day.
Gen Y: Opportunities and Challenges
The next was a presentation by another fellow Wiproites on nuances of the Gen Y and how organizations shall leverage these for maximizing the creative outputs. Defining Gen-Y as those born after 1980, which is a staggering 21% of the global workforce, Anjali Desai depicted that management needs to wear a different hat while enabling this bent of people. Key of these include: Encourage their “can-do” attitude; Take advantage of their comfort with “team-work”; Give them challenges and change; Multi-taskers – the best so far; and Capitalize on their “networking abilities”. Very clearly Gen-Y is the workforce of future, and to leverage them we need to engineer ourselves.
MerticTrac, is India's Largest Skills Assessment Company, recently won the NASSCOM IT Innovation Award for 2007. The firm has successfully redefine the online testing paradigm in India through its revolutionary test management applications. As per Srinivas Rao, who champions campus relations at the firm, the key to MeritTrac’s growth lies in its ability to give freedom to employees to arrive a newer ways of solving problems. The firm regularly organizes Innovation Contests for employees, leverage Students Forums for product development and all this is fostered by an open culture of exchanging thoughts. A lot to learn from this agile leader.
Innovation @ Intense Technologies
The next came Suvid Kotia an associate with Intense Technologies who took us through the firm’s approach towards creating new products, leveraging the employee level creativity. Suvid spoke of that how Intense Technologies encourage employees to take roles across multiple business units and function areas rapidly, such that their ability to come up with ideas is high. Also as the associate is, by design, exposed to multiple disciplines of the firm, the ideas are much more implementable. At this, the debate erupted that: “does small organization foster better creativity and as they grow creativity becomes thinner.” With campers coming from start-ups and smaller companies, and other Wiproites, debate halted at the voice that- creativity is a cultural phenomenon and can be installed in an organization of any size, example being Toyota.
Mission 10x
In an attempt to address the talent shortage at the higher education in India, Wipro Technologies took up an audacious mission of “Increase Graduate Employability from x to 10x using Mission10x Learning Approach (MXLA)”. The same is referred to as Mission 10X. Pavan Atukuri from the Mission 10x team took the audience through a very interesting presentation on how the team approached this opportunity and the milestones. He explained that the breakthrough proposition was to make a student imbibe ‘higher levels of understanding’ of a subject taught in classrooms along with development of ‘key behavioral skills’ in parallel. This entailed Faculty Enablement through layered set of workshops on Innovative teaching techniques and effective usage of Tools & Technologies. More on this at http://www.mission10x.com
Creativity with Students: A College’s Experience
Needless to say that best comes towards the end. The presentation on “Creativity with Students” made by Dr. V V Rao from Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology (SNIST) Hyderabad talked of some of the incredible work that institute has done towards fostering creativity amongst students. In this belief, innovation starts with looking for problems around and marrying to existing innovations. With this belief, over past one decade the institute, under the stewardship of Dr. Rao and numerous other faculties has encourages B Tech students to take up seemingly impossible tasks and carve out successful innovations. Of the many such innovations that the students arrive at, plenty gets commercialized too. He impressed upon the fact that creative people needs to be identified, and the yardstick he adopts is a sum of skills and likings. A truly heart-to-heart conversation and the best possible conclusion of the Hyderabad WiCamp.
