Innovation competition - Part 1

Innovation competition

So after a long time got a chance to write and publish on this topic.

Had thought about writing something on this long ago but was not able to put to gather those magic moments in words. It's just that every time i sat down to write, i felt paralyzed. Where should i begin? every time i started to write something, i'd read over it and it didn't seem right. So i'd tear it up and promise that i'd start over again the next day. But one day just kept turning into the next and then , too much time had passed.

It was the first time i have took part in such competition. Even it was the first such competition held at my office. Competition to find innovative ideas, discuss it and present it in front of jury.

It was just my good luck to be part of such unique team. As per one of the member ours was the complete team with lots of diversity. We had one developer, one QA, one documentation expert and one architect in our team. We all were cab mates and one fine evening one of the member came up with idea that why don’t we participate in it. We were travelling from GNR to AHD and without much discussion all were agreed to it and we had beautiful days and life long memories.

We used to spend 2 hours daily in travelling and we have decided to utilize those two hours to discuss the idea. One of the senior member had suggested that first we have to zeroed down on problem statement. Then we can start thinking about solution of that problem. Let me correct bit innovative solution of that problem.

So we had started looking for problems we used to face in our day to day life... There were plenty of them but i don’t remember all of them or say all of them were not that much important. I have listed down few of them which had some funny discussion associated with.

First one is traffic problem. One of the team mate suggested that in Ahmedabad we have very big issue with traffic. Certainly all were agree with problem statement. So after that we had started discussing about solution and that discussion was the one of the funniest part of the competition. One of the friend suggested that traffic issue is result of our typical Ahmedabad mentality.

For normal people....

Red light - stop, yellow means stop watch and go.....green means go.

For ahmedabadi people....

Green means go....yellow means go fast and....red means.... (check if anyone is looking otherwise) go very fast...

So very basic solution is to stop them forcefully at traffic signal. What normal people think about the situation...well that’s not important we were not normal not at that time at least. One member of team came up with idea. Let’s install spikes at each traffic point. When signal turns red Spikes will come up on the surface so vehicles can't break signals. Just like German cops use to stop criminals. I don’t know how this spike turned into iron grill which block the road entirely. Now that was the rule of discussion that when one team member suggest solution other team member have to throw counter arguments about solution. So one more member had said that what if street cow or dogs tries to cross the road. In this case we will have barbecue :p. I just have small smile while writing this but believe me we had a quite 5 minutes laughter on this during that time of discussion.

I don’t exactly recall all the point of discussion but at one point of time we also had one of my friend suggested idea of creating fighter train. She was just like we have fighter plane...fighter ship...but how come no one had idea of creating a fighter train. All of us were just listening and suddenly I woke up with statement like "but train runs on track...its route will be very predictable and how can it fight...."... I know it seems very normal to read this line but again you have to believe that the expression on my face and that situation was damn funny. Again we had quite good laugh on this topic at that time and many a time down the line during this last one year.

There were few more funny topics like smart fridge and bio luminous something something....but i don’t recall any funny incident related to those topic. Only funny part i remember is the image of Chinese girl which one member had shared with us. I can also recall one more incident and destructive idea but someone will kill me if i write it over here.... :p

Then we also had lots of fun after zeroed down on topic . But let me limit this post to topics we have not considered for presentation. I will cover that topic and funny moments associated with them in my next post.

Thanks a ton for giving me few memorable moments of my life.

P.S. I have tried many time but was not able to write .....I have started many times but abandoned idea soon after writing few lines. Right now I am uploading this while sitting on highway having coffee in hand. After fantastic start of week i have spoiled it. Starting of the week was so perfect that I can never imagine but as always i have spoiled it.... regretting it now.....there are many happy moments associated with this and I don't wanna loss any of them by any chance.....