- May 25, 2021
- Posted by: Roshan Sapkota
- Category: Blog/Article
The second talk session organised by BIC Startups in collaboration with Skill Lab had Kavyaa Rizal, who is the creative director at Utopia, Nepal. The session started at 11:00 AM and had a maximum of 60 participants.
The speaker started with her background of how Utopia is working on solving modern urban problems and supporting collaboration to help social enterprises. Her main topic was about the crisis situation we are in and the shift in the functioning of businesses to cope up with it. She argued about the importance of not making big decisions right now, and to stop and strategize.
Ms. Rizal shared two models of innovation:
- Human-Centered Design (Design Thinking)
This model included the ability of a business to understand its users, be it the behaviors of clients, consumers, employees or investors. Empathy and communication play important roles in this model. The two suggestions she gave were to respond to your users & have your service accessible to them.
- Jugaad Innovation
This model embraced the eastern philosophy of frugality; of limited resources and innovating more with less. As developing countries have a volatile environment and many obstacles, problems are always changing and complexity is counterproductive. Her suggestions were of frugality, flexibility & inclusiveness.
Frugality means trying to use the least amount of resources possible to accomplish a certain task. It means doing with whatever resources you have rather than trying to find additional resources.
The main focus during the Q&A session was on ways of measuring the social impact of business, contextual examples of jugaad innovation and its implementation in the Nepalese context, and how to transition from jugaad innovation to systematic innovation.
The discussion was highly engaging with effective and impromptu responses from the speaker. The session had high-value learning with discussions happening within the premise of the topic. It is difficult to quantify the knowledge acquired through these types of sessions but we believe that participants learned quite a lot from the positive feedback received.
- By Niraj Aryal