And if I were to start my own company...

Company: Tagplay

Function: To make RFID tags for devices like keys, mobile, spectacles, important items, basically everything you need to keep a track of.

Vision: To make your life easier. Everyday.

Mission: Enrich your lives by providing solutions to meet your daily need of locating and tracking articles, trivial and important.

BHAGs:

Establishing our presence in every household and company

Continuously evolving to meet the demand generated by newer articles introduced in the market

Strengthening our position to simplify the daily life of people worldwide

A Merger of Two E(at)quals

KFC's vision: America’s Leading Kitchen for Convenient Meals

McDonald's: Its vision is to be the world's best quick service restaurant experience.

After their merger :

Vision : To be The place to eat

Mission: Provide convenient meals while enriching the restaurant experience of millions of people worldwide

BHAGS:

Be the most preferred and frequented joint of people across all age groups

Beat our own records for quick delivery and efficient service.

How P&G Tripled their Innovation Success Rate

How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate. By: Brown, Bruce, Anthony, Scott D., Harvard Business Review, 00178012, Jun2011, Vol. 89, Issue 6

The Idea in Brief

Procter & Gamble is a famous innovator. Nonetheless, in the early 2000s only 15% of its innovations were meeting their revenue and profit targets. To address this, the company set about building organizational structures to systematize innovation.

The resulting new-growth factory includes large new-business creation groups, focused project teams, and entrepreneurial guides who help teams rapidly prototype and test new products and business models in the market. The teams follow a step-by-step business development manual and use specialized project and portfolio management tools. Innovation and strategy assessments, once separate, are now combined in revamped executive reviews.

P&G's experience suggests six lessons for leaders looking to build new-growth factories: Coordinate the factory with the company's core businesses, be a vigilant portfolio manager, start small and grow carefully, create tools for gauging new businesses, make sure the right people are doing the right work, and nurture cross-pollination.

P&G's Four Types of Innovation

Sustaining

Sustaining innovations bring incremental improvements to existing products: a little more cleaning power to a laundry detergent, a better flavor to a toothpaste. These provide what P&G calls "er" benefits--better, easier, cheaper--that are important to sustaining share among current customers and getting new people to try a product.

Commercial

Commercial innovations use creative marketing, packaging, and promotional approaches to grow existing offerings. During the 2010 Winter Olympics, P&G ran a series of ads celebrating mothers. The campaign covered 18 brands, was viewed repeatedly by hundreds of millions of consumers, and drove $100 million in revenues.

Transformational-Sustaining

Transformational-sustaining innovations reframe existing categories. They typically bring order-of-magnitude improvements and fundamental changes to a business and often lead to breakthroughs in market share, profit levels, and consumer acceptance. In 2009 P&G introduced the wrinkle-reducing cream Olay Pro-X. Launching a $40-a-bottle product in the depths of a recession might seem a questionable strategy. But P&G went ahead because it considered the product a transformational-sustaining innovation--clinically proven to be as effective as its much more expensive prescription counterparts, and superior to the company's other anti-aging offerings. The cream and related products generated first-year sales of $50 million in U.S. food retailers and drugstores alone.

Disruptive

Disruptive innovations represent new-to-the-world business opportunities. A company enters entirely new businesses with radically new offerings, as P&G did with Swiffer and Febreze.

The Factory's Consumer Research at Work

In October 2010 P&G launched the Gillette Guard razor in India, a transformational-sustaining innovation whose strategic intent was simple: to provide a cheaper and effective alternative for the hundreds of millions of Indians who use double-edged razors.

The company's researchers spent thousands of hours in the market to understand these consumers' needs. They gained important insights by observing men in rural areas who, lacking indoor plumbing, typically shave outdoors using little or no water--and don't shave every day. The single-blade Gillette Guard was thus designed to clean easily, with minimal water, and to manage longer stubble. The initial retail price was 15 rupees (33 cents), with refill cartridges for five rupees (11 cents). Early tests showed that consumers preferred the new product to double-edged razors by a six-to-one margin. Its breakthrough performance and affordability position it for rapid growth.

Inside the company's new-growth factory

BACK IN 2000 the prospects for Procter & Gamble's Tide, the biggest brand in the company's fabric and household care division, seemed limited. The laundry detergent had been around for more than 50 years and still dominated its core markets, but it was no longer growing fast enough to support P&G's needs. A decade later Tide's revenues have nearly doubled, helping push annual division revenues from $12 billion to almost $24 billion. The brand is surging in emerging markets, and its iconic bull's-eye logo is turning up on an array of new products and even new businesses, from instant clothes fresheners to neighborhood dry cleaners.

This isn't accidental. It's the result of a strategic effort by P&G over the past decade to systematize innovation and growth.

To understand P&G's strategy, we need to go back more than a century to the sources of its inspiration--Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. In the 1870s Edison created the world's first industrial research lab, Menlo Park, which gave rise to the technologies behind the modern electric-power and motion-picture industries. Under his inspired direction, the lab churned out ideas; Edison himself ultimately held more than 1,000 patents. Edison of course understood the importance of mass production, but it was his friend Henry Ford who, decades later, perfected it. In 1910 the Ford Motor Company shifted the production of its famous Model T from the Piquette Avenue Plant, in Detroit, to its new Highland Park complex nearby. Although the assembly line wasn't a novel concept, Highland Park showed what it was capable of: In four years Ford slashed the time required to build a car from more than 12 hours to just 93 minutes.

How could P&G marry the creativity of Edison's lab with the speed and reliability of Ford's factory? The answer its leaders devised, a "new-growth factory," is still ramping up. But already it has helped the company strengthen both its core businesses and its ability to capture innovative new-growth opportunities.

P&G's efforts to systematize the serendipity that so often sparks new-business creation carry important lessons for leaders faced with shrinking product life cycles and increasing global competition.

Laying the Foundation

Innovation has long been the backbone of P&G's growth. As chairman, president, and CEO Bob McDonald notes, "We know from our history that while promotions may win quarters, innovation wins decades." The company spends nearly $2 billion annually on R&D--roughly 50% more than its closest competitor, and more than most other competitors combined. Each year it invests at least another $400 million in foundational consumer research to discover opportunities for innovation, conducting some 20,000 studies involving more than 5 million consumers in nearly 100 countries. Odds are that as you're reading this, P&G researchers are in a store somewhere observing shoppers, or even in a consumer's home.

These investments are necessary but not sufficient to achieve P&G's innovation goals. "People will innovate for financial gain or for competitive advantage, but this can be self-limiting," McDonald says. "There needs to be an emotional component as well--a source of inspiration that motivates people." At P&G that inspiration lies in a sense of purpose driven from the top down--the message that each innovation improves people's lives.

At the start of the 2000s only about 15% of P&G's innovations were meeting revenue and profit targets. So the company launched its now well-known Connect + Develop program to bring in outside innovations and built a robust stage-gate process to help manage ideas from inception to launch.(For more on C+D, see Larry Huston and Nabil Sakkab, "Connect and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble's New Model for Innovation," HBR March 2006.) These actions showed early signs of raising innovation success rates, but it was clear that without a further boost to its organic growth capabilities, the company would still have trouble hitting its targets.

P&G's leaders recognized that the kind of growth the company was after couldn't come from simply doing more of the same. It needed to come up with more breakthrough innovations--ones that could create completely new markets. And it needed to do this as reliably as Henry Ford's Highland Park factory had rolled out Model Ts.

In 2004 Gil Cloyd, then the chief technology officer, and A.G. Lafley, then the CEO, tasked two 30-year P&G veterans, John Leikhim and David Goulait, with designing a new-growth factory whose intellectual underpinnings would derive from the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen's disruptive-innovation theory. The basic concept of disruption--driving growth through new offerings that are simpler, more convenient, easier to access, or more affordable--was hardly foreign to P&G. Many of the company's powerhouse brands, including Tide, Crest, Pampers, and Swiffer, had followed disruptive paths.

Leikhim and Goulait, with support from other managers, began by holding a two-day workshop for seven new-product-development teams, guided by facilitators from Innosight (a firm Christensen cofounded). The attendees explored how to shake up embedded ways of thinking that can inhibit disruptive approaches. They formulated creative ways to address critical commercial questions--for example, whether demand would be sufficient to warrant a new-product launch. Learning from the workshop helped spur the development of new products, such as the probiotic supplement Align, and also bolstered existing ones, such as Pampers.

In the years that followed, Leikhim and Goulait shored up the factory's foundation, working with Cloyd and other P&G leaders to:

Teach senior management and project team members the mind-sets and behaviors that foster disruptive growth. The training, which has changed over time, initially ranged from short modules on topics such as assessing the demand for an early-stage idea to multiday courses in entrepreneurial thinking.

Form a group of new-growth-business guides to help teams working on disruptive projects. These experts might, for instance, advise teams to remain small until their project's key commercial questions, such as whether consumers would habitually use the new product, have been answered.The guides include several entrepreneurs who have succeeded--and, even more important, failed--in starting businesses.

Develop organizational structures to drive new growth. For example, in a handful of business units the company created small groups focused primarily on new-growth initiatives. The groups (which, like the training, have evolved significantly) augmented an existing entity, FutureWorks, whose charter is to create new brands and business models. Dedicated teams within the groups conducted market research, developed technology, created business plans, and tested assumptions for specific projects.

Produce a process manual --a step-by-step guide to creating new-growth businesses. The manual includes overarching principles as well as detailed procedures and templates to help teams describe opportunities, identify requirements for success, monitor progress, make go/no-go decisions, and more.

Run demonstration projects to showcase the emerging factory's work. One of these was a line of pocket-size products called Swash, which quickly refresh clothes: For example, someone who's in a hurry can give a not-quite-clean shirt a spray rather than putting it through the wash.

Sharpening the Focus

By 2008 P&G had a working prototype of the factory, but the company's innovation portfolio was weighed down by a proliferation of small projects.A.G. Lafley charged Bob McDonald (then the COO) and CTO Bruce Brown (a coauthor of this article) to dramatically increase innovation output by focusing the factory on fewer but bigger initiatives. McDonald and Brown's team drove three critical improvements.

First, rather than strictly separating innovations designed to bolster existing product lines from efforts to create new product lines or business models, P&G increased its emphasis on an intermediate category: transformational-sustaining innovations, which deliver major new benefits in existing product categories.

Consider the Crest brand, the market leader until the late 1990s, when it was usurped by Colgate. Looking for a comeback, in 2000 P&G launched a disruptive innovation, Crest Whitestrips, that made teeth whitening at home affordable and easy. In 2006 it introduced Crest Pro-Health, which squeezes half a dozen benefits into one tube--the toothpaste fights cavities, plaque, tartar, stains, gingivitis, and bad breath. In 2010 it rolled out Crest 3D White, a line of advanced oral care products, including one that whitens teeth in two hours. Such efforts helped Crest retake the lead in many markets. Pro-Health and 3D White were both transformational-sustaining innovations, meant to appeal to current consumers while attracting new ones.These sorts of innovations share an important trait with market-creating disruptive innovations: They have a high degree of uncertainty--something the factory is specifically designed to manage.

Second, P&G strengthened organizational supports for the formation of transformational-sustaining and disruptive businesses. It established several new-business-creation groups, larger in size and scope than any previous growth-factory team, whose resources and management are kept carefully separate from the core business. These groups--dedicated teams led by a general manager--develop ideas that cut across multiple businesses, and also pursue entirely new business opportunities. One group covers all of P&G's beauty and personal care businesses; another covers its household care business (the parent unit of the fabric-and-household and the family-and-baby-care divisions); a third, FutureWorks, focuses largely on enabling different business models (it helped guide P&G's recent partnership with the Indian business Healthpoint Services). The new groups supplement (rather than replace) existing supports such as the Corporate Innovation Fund, which provides seed capital to ideas that might otherwise slip through the cracks. P&G also created a specialized team called Learning-Works, which helps plan and execute in-market experiments to learn about purchase decisions and post-purchase use.

Third, P&G revamped its strategy development and review process. Innovation and strategy assessments had historically been handled separately. Now the CEO, CTO, and CFO explicitly link company, business, and innovation strategies. This integration, coupled with new analyses of such issues as competitive factors that could threaten a given business, has surfaced more opportunities for innovation. The process has also prompted examinations of each unit's "production schedule," or pipeline of growth opportunities, to ensure that it's robust enough to deliver against growth goals for the next seven to 10 years. Evaluations are made of individual business units (feminine care, for example) as well as broad sectors (household care). This revised approach calls for each business unit to determine the mix of innovation types it needs to deliver the required growth.

Running the Factory

Let's return now to Tide, whose dramatic growth highlights the potential of P&G's approach. Over the past decade the brand has launched numerous products and product-line extensions, carved new paths in emerging markets, and tested a promising new business model.

If you had looked for Tide in a U.S. supermarket 10 years ago, you would have found, for the most part, ordinary bottles and boxes of detergent. Now you'll see the Tide name on dozens of products, all with different scents and capabilities. For example, in 2009 P&G introduced a line of laundry additives called Tide Stain Release. Within a year, building on 26 patents, it incorporated these additives into a new detergent, Tide with Acti-Lift--the first major redesign of Tide's liquid laundry detergent in a decade. The product's launch drove immediate marketshare growth of the Tide brand in the United States.

P&G has also customized formulations for emerging markets. Ethnographic research showed that about 80% of consumers in India wash their clothes by hand. They had to choose between detergents that were relatively gentle on the skin but not very good at actually cleaning clothes, and more-potent but harsher agents. With the problem clearly identified, in 2009 a team came up with Tide Naturals, which cleaned well without causing irritation.Mindful of the need in emerging markets to provide greater benefit at lower cost--"more for less"--P&G priced Tide Naturals 30% below comparably effective but harsher products. This made the Tide brand accessible to 70% of Indian consumers and has helped to significantly increase Tide's share in India.

More radically, Swash moved the Tide brand out of the laundry room. The line has clear disruptive characteristics: Swash products don't clean as thoroughly as laundry detergents or remove wrinkles as effectively as professional pressing. But because they're quick and easy to use, they offer "good enough" occasional alternatives between washes. Swash took an unconventional path to commercialization. When the products were first sold, in a store near P&G's headquarters in Ohio, they carried a different brand name and had no apparent connection to Tide. After that experiment, P&G opened a "pop up" Swash store at The Ohio State University. Both tests helped the company understand how consumers would buy and use the products, which P&G then began selling exclusively through Amazon and other online channels. In early 2011 the company ramped down its promotion of Swash, although learning from the effort will inform its work on other disruptive ideas in the clothes-refreshing space.

Whereas Swash was a new product line, Tide Dry Cleaners represents an entirely new business model. It started when a team began exploring ways to disrupt the dry-cleaning market, using proprietary technologies and a unique store design grounded in insights about consumers' frustrations with existing options. Many cleaning establishments are dingy, unfriendly places. Customers have to park, walk, and wait. Often the cleaners' hours are inconvenient. P&G's alternative: bright, boldly colored cleaners featuring specialized treatments, drive-through windows, and 24-hour storage lockers to facilitate after-hours drop-off and pickup.

Using the new-growth factory's process manual, the development team identified key assumptions about the proposed dry cleaners. For example, could the business model generate enough returns to attract store owners willing to pay up to $1 million for franchise rights? In 2009 P&G's guides helped the team open three pilots in Kansas City to try to find out. That year P&G also formed Agile Pursuits Franchising, a subsidiary to oversee such efforts, and transferred ownership of the dry-cleaning venture to FutureWorks, whose main mission is to pursue new business models that lie outside P&G's established systems. It remains to be seen how Tide Dry Cleaners will fare, but one promising sign came in 2010, when Andrew Cherng, the founder of the Panda Restaurant Group, announced plans to open 150 franchises in four years. He told BusinessWeek, "I wasn't around when McDonald's was taking franchisees, [but] I'm not going to miss this one."

To ensure strategic cohesion and smart resource allocation, Tide's innovation efforts have been closely coordinated through regular dialogues among several leaders--CEO McDonald, CTO Brown, the vice-chair of the household business unit, and the president of the fabric care division. They've also been the focus of discussions at Corporate Innovation Fund meetings and similar reviews. This isn't just the methodical pursuit of a single innovation. It's part of a steady stream of ideas in development--a factory humming with work.

Lessons for Leaders

Efforts to build a new-growth factory in any company will fail unless senior managers create the right organizational structures, provide the proper resources, allow sufficient time for experimentation and learning, and personally engage. Our journey at P&G suggests six lessons for leaders looking to create new-growth factories.

1. Closely coordinate the factory and the core business. Leaders sometimes see efforts to foster new growth as completely distinct from efforts to bolster the core; indeed, many in the innovation community have argued as much for years. Our experience indicates the opposite. First, new-growth efforts depend on a healthy core business. A healthy core produces a cash flow that can be invested in new growth. And we've all known times when an ailing core has demanded management's full attention; a healthy core frees leaders to think about more-expansive growth initiatives.

Second, a core business is rich with capabilities that can support new-growth efforts. Consider P&G's excellent relationships with major retailers. Those relationships are a powerful, hard-to-replicate asset that helps the factory expedite new-growth initiatives. Swiffer wouldn't be Swiffer without them.

Third, some of the tools for managing core efforts--particularly those that track a project's progress--are also useful for managing new-growth efforts.And finally, the factory's rapid-learning approach often yields insights that can strengthen existing product lines. One of the project teams at the 2004 workshop was seeking to spur conversion in emerging markets from cloth to disposable diapers. Subsequent in-market tests yielded a critical discovery:Babies who wore disposable diapers fell asleep 30% faster and slept 30 minutes longer than babies wearing cloth diapers--an obvious benefit for infants (and their parents). Advertising campaigns touting this advantage helped make Pampers the number one brand in several emerging markets.

2. Promote a portfolio mind-set. P&G communicates to both internal and external stakeholders that it is building a varied portfolio of innovation approaches, ranging from sustaining to disruptive ones. (See the sidebar "P&G's Four Types of Innovation.") It uses a set of master-planning tools to match the pace of innovation to the overall needs of the business. It also deploys portfolio-optimization tools that help managers identify and kill the least-promising programs and nurture the best bets. These tools create projections for every active idea, including estimates of the financial potential and the human and capital investments that will be required. Some ideas are evaluated with classic net-present-value calculations, others with a risk-adjusted real-option approach, and still others with more-qualitative criteria. Although the tools assemble a rank-ordered list of projects, P&G's portfolio management isn't, at its core, a mechanical exercise; it's a dialogue about resource allocation and business-growth building blocks. Numerical input informs but doesn't dictate decisions.

A portfolio approach has several benefits. First, it sets up the expectation that different projects will be managed, resourced, and measured in different ways, just as an investor would use different criteria to evaluate an equity investment and a real estate one. Second, because the portfolio consists largely of sustaining and transformational-sustaining efforts, seeing it as a whole highlights the critical importance of these activities, which protect and extend core businesses. Finally, a portfolio approach helps reinforce the message that any project, particularly a disruptive one, may carry substantial risk and might not deliver commercial results--and that's fine, as long as the portfolio accounts for the risk.

3. Start small and grow carefully. Remember how the new-growth factory began: with a simple two-day workshop. It then expanded to small-scale pilots in several business units before becoming a companywide initiative.

Staged investment allows for early, rapid revision--before lines scribbled on a hypothetical organizational chart are engraved in stone. It also provides for targeted experimentation. For example, there is legitimate disagreement about the best way to organize for new growth. Whereas we believe in a factory with relatively strong ties to the core, some advocate a "skunkworks" organization. Others argue for "distinct but linked" organizations under an "ambidextrous" leader; still others recommend mirroring the structure of a venture capital firm. (P&G's factory uses several organizational approaches.) Treating capability development itself as a new-growth innovation lets companies try different approaches and learn what works best for them.

A staged approach serves another important purpose: It's a built-in reminder that a new-growth factory is not a quick fix. The factory won't provide a sudden boost to next quarter's results, nor can it instantly rein in an out-of-control core business that's veering from crisis to crisis

4. Create new tools for gauging new businesses. Anticipated and nascent markets are notoriously hard to analyze. Detailed follow-up with one of the project teams that attended the pilot workshop showed P&G that it needed new tools for this purpose. P&G now conducts "transaction learning experiments," or TLEs, in which a team "makes a little and sells a little," thus letting consumers vote with their wallets. Teams have sold small amounts of products online, at mall kiosks, in pop-up stores, and at amusement parks--even in the company store and outside company cafeterias. P&G devised a venture capital approach to testing the market for Align, its probiotic supplement, providing seed capital for a controlled pilot. The company has also tested entire business models--recall the Kansas City pilots of Tide Dry Cleaners.

5. Make sure you have the right people doing the right work. Building the factory forced P&G to change the way it staffed certain teams. At any given time the company has hundreds of teams working on various innovation efforts. In the past, most teams consisted mainly of part-time members--employees who had other responsibilities pulling at them. But disruptive and transformational-sustaining efforts require undivided attention.(As the old saying goes, nine women can't make a baby in a month.) There need to be people who wake up each day and go to sleep each night obsessing about the new business.

New-growth teams also need to be small and nimble, and they should include seasoned members. P&G found that big teams often bog down because they pursue too many ideas at once, whereas small teams are better able to quickly focus on the most-promising initiatives. Having several members with substantial innovation experience helps teams confidently make sound judgment calls when data are inconclusive or absent.

Finally, building a factory requires a substantial investment in widespread, ongoing training. Changing mind-sets begins, literally, with teaching a new language. Key terms such as "disruptive innovation," "job to be done," "business model," and "critical assumptions" must be clearly and consistently defined. P&G reinforces key innovation concepts both at large meetings and at smaller, focused workshops, and in 2007 it established a "disruptive innovation college." People working on new-growth projects can choose from more than a dozen courses, ranging from basic innovation language to designing and executing a TLE, sketching out a business model, staffing a new-growth team, and identifying a job to be done.

6. Encourage intersections. Successful innovation requires rich cross-pollination both inside and outside the organization. P&G's Connect + Develop program is part of a larger effort to intersect with other disciplines and gain new perspectives. Over the past few years P&G has:

• Shared people with noncompeting companies. In 2008 P&G and Google swapped two dozen employees for a few weeks. P&G wanted greater exposure to online models; Google was interested in learning more about how to build brands.

• Engaged even more outside innovators. In 2010 P&G refreshed its C+D goals. It aims to become the partner of choice for innovation collaboration, and to triple C+D's contribution to P&G's innovation development (which would mean deriving $3 billion of the company's annual sales growth from outside innovators). It has expanded the program to forge additional connections with government labs, universities, small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, consortia, and venture capital firms.

• Brought in outside talent. P&G has traditionally promoted from within. But it recognized that total reliance on this approach could stunt its ability to create new-growth businesses. So it began bringing in high-level people to address needs beyond its core capabilities, as when it hired an outsider to run Agile Pursuits Franchising. In that one stroke, it acquired expertise in franchise-based business models that would have taken years to build organically.

SOME THINK it's foolish for large companies to even attempt to create innovative-growth businesses. They maintain that organizations should just outsource innovation, by acquiring promising start-ups.

But P&G's efforts appear to be working. Recall that in 2000 only 15% of its innovation efforts met profit and revenue targets. Today the figure is 50%.The past fiscal year was one of the most productive innovation years in the company's history, and the company's three- and five-year innovation portfolios are sufficient to deliver against their growth objectives. Projections suggest that the typical initiative in 2014 and 2015 will have nearly twice the revenue of today's initiatives. That's a six-fold increase in output without any significant increase in inputs.

Our experience tells us that although individual creativity can be unpredictable and uncontrollable, collective creativity can be managed. Although the next Tide or Crest innovation might stumble, the factory's methodical approach should bring many more innovations successfully to market. The factory process can create sustainable sources of revenue growth--no matter how big a company becomes.

GILLETTE GUARD After thousands of hours of research in the field, P&G learned that a single-blade razor was a cheaper and effective alternative to double-edged razors for many consumers in India.

CREST 3D WHITE Usurped by Colgate in the late 1990s, Crest has regained the lead in many markets owing to its introduction of several innovative oral care products, including ones that make teeth whitening at home affordable and easy.

TIDE DRY CLEANERS Still in an early stage, this innovation arose in part from insights about consumers' frustrations with the dinginess and inconvenience of most existing dry-cleaning establishments.

How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity

The following article by Ed Catmull talks about how Pixar Studios, the leading animation studio in the world, fosters a culture of creativity and innovation.

How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity. By: Catmull, Ed, Harvard Business Review, 00178012, Sep2008, Vol. 86, Issue 9

Behind Pixar's string of hit movies, says the studio's president, is a peer-driven process for solving problems

A few years ago, I had lunch with the head of a major motion picture studio, who declared that his central problem was not finding good people - it was finding good ideas. Since then, when giving talks, I've asked audiences whether they agree with him. Almost always there's a 50/50 split, which has astounded me because I couldn't disagree more with the studio executive. His belief is rooted in a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in creating an original product. And it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how to manage the large risks inherent in producing breakthroughs.

When it comes to producing breakthroughs, both technological and artistic, Pixar's track record is unique. In the early 1990s, we were known as the leading technological pioneer in the field of computer animation. Our years of R&D culminated in the release of Toy Story in 1995, the world's first computer-animated feature film. In the following 13 years, we have released eight other films (A Bug's Life; Toy Story 2; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Cars; Ratatouille; and WALLE), which also have been blockbusters. Unlike most other studios, we have never bought scripts or movie ideas from the outside. All of our stories, worlds, and characters were created internally by our community of artists. And in making these films, we have continued to push the technological boundaries of computer animation, securing dozens of patents in the process.

While I'm not foolish enough to predict that we will never have a flop, I don't think our success is largely luck. Rather, I believe our adherence to a set of principles and practices for managing creative talent and risk is responsible. Pixar is a community in the true sense of the word. We think that lasting relationships matter, and we share some basic beliefs: Talent is rare. Management's job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. It must be safe to tell the truth. We must constantly challenge all of our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture. In the last two years, we've had a chance to test whether our principles and practices are transferable. After Pixar's 2006 merger with the Walt Disney Company, its CEO, Bob Iger, asked me, chief creative officer John Lasseter, and other Pixar senior managers to help him revive Disney Animation Studios. The success of our efforts prompted me to share my thinking on how to build a sustainable creative organization.

What Is Creativity?

People tend to think of creativity as a mysterious solo act, and they typically reduce products to a single idea: This is a movie about toys, or dinosaurs, or love, they'll say. However, in filmmaking and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems. The initial idea for the movie - what people in the movie business call "the high concept" - is merely one step in a long, arduous process that takes four to five years.

A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They're in the form of every sentence; in the performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds; in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, the pacing. The director and the other creative leaders of a production do not come up with all the ideas on their own; rather, every single member of the 200- to 250-person production group makes suggestions. Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization. The leaders sort through a mass of ideas to find the ones that fit into a coherent whole - that support the story - which is a very difficult task. It's like an archaeological dig where you don't know what you're looking for or whether you will even find anything. The process is downright scary.

Then again, if we aren't always at least a little scared, we're not doing our job. We're in a business whose customers want to see something new every time they go to the theater. This means we have to put ourselves at great risk. Our most recent film, WALLE, is a robot love story set in a post-apocalyptic world full of trash. And our previous movie, Ratatouille, is about a French rat who aspires to be a chef. Talk about unexpected ideas! At the outset of making these movies, we simply didn't know if they would work. However, since we're supposed to offer something that isn't obvious, we bought into somebody's initial vision and took a chance.

To act in this fashion, we as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks, which, of course, is much easier said than done.In the movie business and plenty of others, this instinct leads executives to choose to copy successes rather than try to create something brand-new.That's why you see so many movies that are so much alike. It also explains why a lot of films aren't very good. If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it's uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What's the key to being able to recover? Talented people! Contrary to what the studio head asserted at lunch that day, such people are not so easy to find.

What's equally tough, of course, is getting talented people to work effectively with one another. That takes trust and respect, which we as managers can't mandate; they must be earned over time. What we can do is construct an environment that nurtures trusting and respectful relationships and unleashes everyone's creativity. If we get that right, the result is a vibrant community where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective work, everyone feels that they are part of something extraordinary, and their passion and accomplishments make the community a magnet for talented people coming out of schools or working at other places. I know what I'm describing is the antithesis of the free-agency practices that prevail in the movie industry, but that's the point: I believe that community matters.

TAKING RISKS Pixar's customers expect to see something new every time. That's downright scary. But if Pixar's executives aren't always a little scared, they're not doing their jobs.

The Roots of Our Culture

My conviction that smart people are more important than good ideas probably isn't surprising. I've had the good fortune to work alongside amazing people in places that pioneered computer graphics.

At the University of Utah, my fellow graduate students included Jim Clark, who co-founded Silicon Graphics and Netscape; John Warnock, who co-founded Adobe; and Alan Kay, who developed object-oriented programming. We had ample funding (thanks to the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency), the professors gave us free rein, and there was an exhilarating and creative exchange of ideas.

At the New York Institute of Technology, where I headed a new computer-animation laboratory, one of my first hires was Alvy Ray Smith, who made breakthroughs in computer painting. That made me realize that it's OK to hire people who are smarter than you are.

Then George Lucas, of Star Wars fame, hired me to head a major initiative at Lucasfilm to bring computer graphics and other digital technology into films and, later, games. It was thrilling to do research within a film company that was pushing the boundaries. George didn't try to lock up the technology for himself and allowed us to continue to publish and maintain strong academic contacts. This made it possible to attract some of the best people in the industry, including John Lasseter, then an animator from Disney, who was excited by the new possibilities of computer animation.

Last but not least, there's Pixar, which began its life as an independent company in 1986, when Steve Jobs bought the computer division from Lucasfilm, allowing us to pursue our dream of producing computer-animated movies. Steve gave backbone to our desire for excellence and helped us form a remarkable management team. I'd like to think that Pixar captures what's best about all the places I've worked. A number of us have stuck together for decades, pursuing the dream of making computer-animated films, and we still have the pleasure of working together today.

It was only when Pixar experienced a crisis during the production of Toy Story 2 that my views on how to structure and operate a creative organization began to crystallize. In 1996, while we were working on A Bug's Life, our second movie, we started to make a sequel to Toy Story. We had enough technical leaders to start a second production, but all of our proven creative leaders - the people who had made Toy Story, including John, who was its director; writer Andrew Stanton; editor Lee Unkrich; and the late Joe Ranft, the movie's head of story - were working on A Bug's Life. So we had to form a new creative team of people who had never headed a movie production. We felt this was OK. After all, John, Andrew, Lee, and Joe had never led a full-length animated film production before Toy Story.

Disney, which at that time was distributing and co-financing our films, initially encouraged us to make Toy Story 2 as a "direct to video" - a movie that would be sold only as home videos and not shown first in theaters. This was Disney's model for keeping alive the characters of successful films, and the expectation was that both the cost and quality would be lower. We realized early on, however, that having two different standards of quality in the same studio was bad for our souls, and Disney readily agreed that the sequel should be a theatrical release. The creative leadership, though, remained the same, which turned out to be a problem.

In the early stage of making a movie, we draw storyboards (a comic-book version of the story) and then edit them together with dialogue and temporary music. These are called story reels. The first versions are very rough, but they give a sense of what the problems are, which in the beginning of all productions are many. We then iterate, and each version typically gets better and better. In the case of Toy Story 2, we had a good initial idea for a story, but the reels were not where they ought to have been by the time we started animation, and they were not improving. Making matters worse, the directors and producers were not pulling together to rise to the challenge.

Finally A Bug's Life was finished, freeing up John, Andrew, Lee, and Joe to take over the creative leadership of Toy Story 2. Given where the production was at that point, 18 months would have been an aggressive schedule, but by then we had only eight left to deliver the film. Knowing that the company's future depended on them, crew members worked at an incredible rate. In the end, with the new leadership, they pulled it off.

How did John and his team save the movie? The problem was not the original core concept, which they retained. The main character, a cowboy doll named Woody, is kidnapped by a toy collector who intends to ship him to a toy museum in Japan. At a critical point in the story, Woody has to decide whether to go to Japan or try to escape and go back to Andy, the boy who owned him. Well, since the movie is coming from Pixar and Disney, you know he's going to end up back with Andy. And if you can easily predict what's going to happen, you don't have any drama. So the challenge was to get the audience to believe that Woody might make a different choice. The first team couldn't figure out how to do it.

John, Andrew, Lee, and Joe solved that problem by adding several elements to show the fears toys might have that people could relate to. One is a scene they created called "Jessie's story." Jessie is a cowgirl doll who is going to be shipped to Japan with Woody. She wants to go, and she explains why to Woody. The audience hears her story in the emotional song "When She Loved Me": She had been the darling of a little girl, but the girl grew up and discarded her. The reality is kids do grow up, life does change, and sometimes you have to move on. Since the audience members know the truth of this, they can see that Woody has a real choice, and this is what grabs them. It took our "A" team to add the elements that made the story work.

Toy Story 2 was great and became a critical and commercial success - and it was the defining moment for Pixar. It taught us an important lesson about the primacy of people over ideas: If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.

Toy Story 2 also taught us another important lesson: There has to be one quality bar for every film we produce. Everyone working at the studio at the time made tremendous personal sacrifices to fix Toy Story 2. We shut down all the other productions. We asked our crew to work inhumane hours, and lots of people suffered repetitive stress injuries. But by rejecting mediocrity at great pain and personal sacrifice, we made a loud statement as a community that it was unacceptable to produce some good films and some mediocre films. As a result of Toy Story 2, it became deeply ingrained in our culture that everything we touch needs to be excellent. This goes beyond movies to the DVD production and extras, and to the toys and other consumer products associated with our characters.

Of course, most executives would at least pay lip service to the notion that they need to get good people and should set their standards high. But how many understand the importance of creating an environment that supports great people and encourages them to support one another so the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts? That's what we are striving to do. Let me share what we've learned so far about what works.

Power to the Creatives

Creative power in a film has to reside with the film's creative leadership. As obvious as this might seem, it's not true of many companies in the movie industry and, I suspect, a lot of others. We believe the creative vision propelling each movie comes from one or two people and not from either corporate executives or a development department. Our philosophy is: You get great creative people, you bet big on them, you give them enormous leeway and support, and you provide them with an environment in which they can get honest feedback from everyone.

After Toy Story 2 we changed the mission of our development department. Instead of coming up with new ideas for movies (its role at most studios), the department's job is to assemble small incubation teams to help directors refine their own ideas to a point where they can convince John and our other senior filmmakers that those ideas have the potential to be great films. Each team typically consists of a director, a writer, some artists, and some storyboard people. The development department's goal is to find individuals who will work effectively together. During this incubation stage, you can't judge teams by the material they're producing because it's so rough - there are many problems and open questions. But you can assess whether the teams' social dynamics are healthy and whether the teams are solving problems and making progress. Both the senior management and the development department are responsible for seeing to it that the teams function well.

To emphasize that the creative vision is what matters most, we say we are "filmmaker led." There are really two leaders: the director and the producer.They form a strong partnership. They not only strive to make a great movie but also operate within time, budget, and people constraints. (Good artists understand the value of limits.) During production, we leave the operating decisions to the film's leaders, and we don't second-guess or micromanage them.

Indeed, even when a production runs into a problem, we do everything possible to provide support without undermining their authority. One way we do this is by making it possible for a director to solicit help from our "creative brain trust" of filmmakers. (This group is a pillar of our distinctive peer-based process for making movies - an important topic I'll return to in a moment.) If this advice doesn't suffice, we'll sometimes add reinforcements to the production - such as a writer or co-director - to provide specific skills or improve the creative dynamics of the film's creative leadership.

What does it take for a director to be a successful leader in this environment? Of course, our directors have to be masters at knowing how to tell a story that will translate into the medium of film. This means that they must have a unifying vision - one that will give coherence to the thousands of ideas that go into a movie - and they must be able to turn that vision into clear directives that the staff can implement. They must set people up for success by giving them all the information they need to do the job right without telling them how to do it. Each person on a film should be given creative ownership of even the smallest task.

Good directors not only possess strong analytical skills themselves but also can harness the analytical power and life experiences of their staff members.They are superb listeners and strive to understand the thinking behind every suggestion. They appreciate all contributions, regardless of where or from whom they originate, and use the best ones.

A Peer Culture

Of great importance - and something that sets us apart from other studios - is the way people at all levels support one another. Everyone is fully invested in helping everyone else turn out the best work. They really do feel that it's all for one and one for all. Nothing exemplifies this more than our creative brain trust and our daily review process.

The brain trust. This group consists of John and our eight directors (Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Brenda Chapman, Lee Unkrich, Gary Rydstrom, and Brad Lewis). When a director and producer feel in need of assistance, they convene the group (and anyone else they think would be valuable) and show the current version of the work in progress. This is followed by a lively two-hour give-and-take discussion, which is all about making the movie better. There's no ego. Nobody pulls any punches to be polite. This works because all the participants have come to trust and respect one another. They know it's far better to learn about problems from colleagues when there's still time to fix them than from the audience after it's too late. The problem-solving powers of this group are immense and inspirational to watch.

After a session, it's up to the director of the movie and his or her team to decide what to do with the advice; there are no mandatory notes, and the brain trust has no authority. This dynamic is crucial. It liberates the trust members, so they can give their unvarnished expert opinions, and it liberates the director to seek help and fully consider the advice. It took us a while to learn this. When we tried to export the brain trust model to our technical area, we found at first that it didn't work. Eventually, I realized why: We had given these other review groups some authority. As soon as we said, "This is purely peers giving feedback to each other," the dynamic changed, and the effectiveness of the review sessions dramatically improved.

The origin of the creative brain trust was Toy Story. During a crisis that occurred while making that film, a special relationship developed among John, Andrew, Lee, and Joe, who had remarkable and complementary skills. Since they trusted one another, they could have very intense and heated discussions; they always knew that the passion was about the story and wasn't personal. Over time, as other people from inside and outside joined our directors' ranks, the brain trust expanded to what it is today: a community of master filmmakers who come together when needed to help each other.

The dailies. This practice of working together as peers is core to our culture, and it's not limited to our directors and producers. One example is our daily reviews, or "dailies," a process for giving and getting constant feedback in a positive way that's based on practices John observed at Disney and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Lucasfilm's special-effects company.

At Disney, only a small senior group would look at daily animation work. Dennis Muren, ILM's legendary visual-effects supervisor, broadened the participation to include his whole special-effects crew. (John, who joined my computer group at Lucasfilm after leaving Disney, participated in these sessions while we were creating computer-animated effects for Young Sherlock Holmes.)

As we built up an animation crew for Toy Story in the early 1990s, John used what he had learned from Disney and ILM to develop our daily review process. People show work in an incomplete state to the whole animation crew, and although the director makes decisions, everyone is encouraged to comment.

There are several benefits. First, once people get over the embarrassment of showing work still in progress, they become more creative. Second, the director or creative leads guiding the review process can communicate important points to the entire crew at the same time. Third, people learn from and inspire each other; a highly creative piece of animation will spark others to raise their game. Finally, there are no surprises at the end: When you're done, you're done. People's overwhelming desire to make sure their work is "good" before they show it to others increases the possibility that their finished version won't be what the director wants. The dailies process avoids such wasted efforts.

GETTING REAL HELP Pixar's brain trust of directors offers advice on works in progress. But the production's leaders decide what to use and what to ignore.

Technology + Art = Magic

Getting people in different disciplines to treat one another as peers is just as important as getting people within disciplines to do so. But it's much harder. Barriers include the natural class structures that arise in organizations: There always seems to be one function that considers itself and is perceived by others to be the one the organization values the most. Then there's the different languages spoken by different disciplines and even the physical distance between offices. In a creative business like ours, these barriers are impediments to producing great work, and therefore we must do everything we can to tear them down.

Walt Disney understood this. He believed that when continual change, or reinvention, is the norm in an organization and technology and art are together, magical things happen. A lot of people look back at Disney's early days and say, "Look at the artists!" They don't pay attention to his technological innovations. But he did the first sound in animation, the first color, the first compositing of animation with live action, and the first applications of xerography in animation production. He was always excited by science and technology.

At Pixar, we believe in this swirling interplay between art and technology and constantly try to use better technology at every stage of production.John coined a saying that captures this dynamic: "Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology." To us, those aren't just words; they are a way of life that had to be established and still has to be constantly reinforced. Although we are a director- and producer-led meritocracy, which recognizes that talent is not spread equally among all people, we adhere to the following principles:

Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone. This means recognizing that the decision-making hierarchy and communication structure in organizations are two different things. Members of any department should be able to approach anyone in another department to solve problems without having to go through "proper" channels. It also means that managers need to learn that they don't always have to be the first to know about something going on in their realm, and it's OK to walk into a meeting and be surprised. The impulse to tightly control the process is understandable given the complex nature of moviemaking, but problems are almost by definition unforeseen. The most efficient way to deal with numerous problems is to trust people to work out the difficulties directly with each other without having to check for permission.

It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas. We're constantly showing works in progress internally. We try to stagger who goes to which viewing to ensure that there are always fresh eyes, and everyone in the company, regardless of discipline or position, gets to go at some point. We make a concerted effort to make it safe to criticize by inviting everyone attending these showings to e-mail notes to the creative leaders that detail what they liked and didn't like and explain why.

We must stay close to innovations happening in the academic community. We strongly encourage our technical artists to publish their research and participate in industry conferences. Publishing may give away ideas, but it keeps us connected with the academic community. This connection is worth far more than any ideas we may have revealed: It helps us attract exceptional talent and reinforces the belief throughout the company that people are more important than ideas.

We try to break down the walls between disciplines in other ways, as well. One is a collection of in-house courses we offer, which we call Pixar University. It is responsible for training and cross-training people as they develop in their careers. But it also offers an array of optional classes - many of which I've taken - that give people from different disciplines the opportunity to mix and appreciate what everyone does. Some (screenplay writing, drawing, and sculpting) are directly related to our business; some (Pilates and yoga) are not. In a sculpting class will be rank novices as well as world-class sculptors who want to refine their skills. Pixar University helps reinforce the mind-set that we're all learning and it's fun to learn together.

Our building, which is Steve Jobs's brainchild, is another way we try to get people from different departments to interact. Most buildings are designed for some functional purpose, but ours is structured to maximize inadvertent encounters. At its center is a large atrium, which contains the cafeteria, meeting rooms, bathrooms, and mailboxes. As a result, everyone has strong reasons to go there repeatedly during the course of the workday. It's hard to describe just how valuable the resulting chance encounters are.

OVERCOMING INHIBITIONS Showing unfinished work each day liberates people to take risks and try new things because it doesn't have to be perfect the first time.

Staying on the Rails

Observing the rise and fall of computer companies during my career has affected me deeply. Many companies put together a phenomenal group of people who produced great products. They had the best engineers, exposure to the needs of customers, access to changing technology, and experienced management. Yet many made decisions at the height of their powers that were stunningly wrongheaded, and they faded into irrelevance.How could really smart people completely miss something so crucial to their survival? I remember asking myself more than once: "If we are ever successful, will we be equally blind?"

Many of the people I knew in those companies that failed were not very introspective. When Pixar became an independent company, I vowed we would be different. I realized that it's extremely difficult for an organization to analyze itself. It is uncomfortable and hard to be objective. Systematically fighting complacency and uncovering problems when your company is successful have got to be two of the toughest management challenges there are. Clear values, constant communication, routine postmortems, and the regular injection of outsiders who will challenge the status quo aren't enough.Strong leadership is also essential - to make sure people don't pay lip service to the values, tune out the communications, game the processes, and automatically discount newcomers' observations and suggestions. Here's a sampling of what we do:

Postmortems. The first we performed - at the end of A Bug's Life - was successful. But the success of those that followed varied enormously. This caused me to reflect on how to get more out of them. One thing I observed was that although people learn from the postmortems, they don't like to do them. Leaders naturally want to use the occasion to give kudos to their team members. People in general would rather talk about what went right than what went wrong. And after spending years on a film, everybody just wants to move on. Left to their own devices, people will game the system to avoid confronting the unpleasant.

There are some simple techniques for overcoming these problems. One is to try to vary the way you do the postmortems. By definition, they're supposed to be about lessons learned, so if you repeat the same format, you tend to find the same lessons, which isn't productive. Another is to ask each group to list the top five things they would do again and the top five things they wouldn't do. The balance between the positive and the negative helps make it a safer environment. In any event, employ lots of data in the review. Because we're a creative organization, people tend to assume that much of what we do can't be measured or analyzed. That's wrong. Most of our processes involve activities and deliverables that can be quantified. We keep track of the rates at which things happen, how often something has to be reworked, whether a piece of work was completely finished or not when it was sent to another department, and so on. Data can show things in a neutral way, which can stimulate discussion and challenge assumptions arising from personal impressions.

Fresh blood. Successful organizations face two challenges when bringing in new people with fresh perspectives. One is well-known - the not-invented-here syndrome. The other the awe-of-the-institution syndrome (an issue with young new hires) - is often overlooked.

The former has not been a problem for us, thank goodness, because we have an open culture: Continually embracing change the way we do makes newcomers less threatening. Several prominent outsiders who have had a big impact on us (in terms of the exciting ideas they introduced and the strong people they attracted) were readily accepted. They include Brad Bird, who directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille; Jim Morris, who headed Industrial Light & Magic for years before joining Pixar as the producer of WALLE and executive vice president of production; and Richard Hollander, a former executive of the special-effects studio Rhythm & Hues, who is leading an effort to improve our production processes.

The bigger issue for us has been getting young new hires to have the confidence to speak up. To try to remedy this, I make it a practice to speak at the orientation sessions for new hires, where I talk about the mistakes we've made and the lessons we've learned. My intent is to persuade them that we haven't gotten it all figured out and that we want everyone to question why we're doing something that doesn't seem to make sense to them.We do not want people to assume that because we are successful, everything we do is right.

Intellect initiates Innovation

We all, at some point of time or the other, must have wondered how the future would be.

Our imagination has been fueled by a plethora of sci-fi fiction books, cartoons and movies.

Here's a video which will talk about 10 technologies which Already exist and which most of us aren't aware of yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imbFjtX0Gc0&feature=related

Even as I am typing this, I am aware of the speed at which innovations are currently taking place all over the world in laboratories, universities, workplaces and in quite a few cases, the basement. As years go by, technology will advance to produce greater benefits for us all.

I hope that the planet is not forgotten in the midst of the ever-evolving technology.

Here is one of my favourite videos from Microsoft talking about a sustainable future.

Hope you enjoy it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KnIJoHibiQ

all u ever wanted to know about MSP,its benefits and eligibility

Microsoft Student Partners
If you are passionate about technology and looking for a unique opportunity to share that talent, and if you are a good communicator, we are looking for you. Motivated non-final-year undergraduate and post graduate students from across India are invited to apply for the Microsoft Student Partner Program. In exchange for sharing your knowledge and participating in fun activities on your campus, you will get a whole host of benefits, the chance to connect to like-minded people and gain real-world experience to add to your resume. The program allows selected students to work along with professionals from Microsoft and to be a student representative for Microsoft on their college campus. It gives them access to the latest technology and an opportunity to explore and discover a whole new range of technologies. Plus, the best Student Partners also get the opportunity to apply for jobs at Microsoft.

Collaborate ... Innovate ... Celebrate - If this is what you want to do, then nominate yourself to apply for becoming a Microsoft Student Partner. For the nomination-form, eligibilty criteria, and other relevant information, please click the "Application Information" link at the bottom of this Web-page.

Overview of the Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) Program
Eligibility To consider applying for the MSP Program, you must be: · Over 18 years of age · A non-final-year graduate or post-graduate student at an MHRD-/AICTE-approved University/College · Studying a full-time course at the University/College (a referral from a faculty-member could add value)
Competencies A good MSP is one who has the following basic qualities: · Technical competencies o Passionate about software o Quick learner o Respected by peers · Community-building competencies o Enthusiastic about technology o High level of social activity, both online & offline o Can organize college and city-level events · Fundamental competencies o Passionate about Microsoft o Confident & outgoing o Good rapport with faculty o Willing to share knowledge & eager to uplift self and peers
Responsibilities Your short term goals will include: · Complete at least 1 MCP Certification within 3 months · Conduct at least 1 session per month in your College campus Clubs. · Participate and drive at least 50 entries in Imagine Cup 2009 · Promote Microsoft academic projects in campus · Maintain a blog Your long term goals will include: · Promote and build your city-level Microsoft Student User Group · Organize city-level events like Academic Developers’ Conference (DevCon) · Deploy &/or maintain Live@Edu · Sign up an eligible department for MSDN AA · Mentor other MSPs
Benefits As an MSP, a host of benefits are available: · Welcome kit (including invitation letter & visiting cards) · Exclusive MSP Boot-camps conducted by Microsoft · MSDN subscription · Rewards & Recognition for top performers · Networking opportunities · Technical training & resources · Microsoft events · Interactions with MVPs & Microsoft Employees · Internship opportunities at MS and partners · Recruitment opportunities at MS and partners
Selection Process The new MSP selection process which will
FAQs What/Who is a Microsoft Student Partner? A Microsoft Student Partner is an undergraduate student, usually from the school of Engineering, who has a passion for technology and who actively, participates in sharing knowledge among the academic community. Do I get paid to be a Microsoft Student Partner? Is this an internship at Microsoft? No. Though Microsoft Student Partners are as close as a student can get with Microsoft, this is NOT an internship NOR a program that is paid for by Microsoft. The program is a completely voluntary one, with only the shared interest and passion for the latest and the best technology keeps us going. What then, are my advantages in being a Microsoft Student Partner? As a Microsoft Student Partner, you get access to all Microsoft developer resources, first-hand information about our future product features (and yes, deadlines), training and of course, fame. More importantly, it is the ability to now do what you wanted to do for your academic community in your country or city, supported to whatever extent possible by Microsoft. So, you get to do what you want to and get support for it. You said something about an academic community. Is there a special forum run by Microsoft? No. Microsoft strictly does not "run" any user group or forum in cities across the country. Microsoft supports Microsoft technology related user groups in many cities in your country. This is the main workplace for a Microsoft Student Partner. As a Microsoft Student Partner, you run the user group in your city. Microsoft supports this user group with resources, speakers, and such for your group events. So, in my user group, I cannot discuss about GNU/Linux and other open source stuff? Of course you can. Microsoft does not restrict purposeful discussions on the latest in technology. Of course, though, we do not expect you to preach against our products and services. We sincerely want to enrich the large number of young scholars in your country who have the potential but have not realized it. Hmm, what do I do then, as a Microsoft Student Partner? It's simple, really. First up, do what you feel is good and most relevant and beneficial to your student community. We want you to show them the best practices followed in the software development industry, the Visual Studio suite of products, Windows Vista's secrets - beneath the glossy interface, Microsoft Office development, Windows Live API based development, gadgets, Microsoft Expression suite of software for designers, and more! How am I rewarded for my performances? If your performance has been excellent in the academic community, firstly you would be promoted to a Microsoft Student Partner Lead. This Microsoft Student Partner Lead is the integrating force for the rest of the Student Partners and has some special benefits. Most student partners get internships and awards, if not directly recruited into Microsoft. Does a Student Partner get to work with Microsoft in any activity? You bet. As a Microsoft Student Partner, any activity conducted and sponsored by Microsoft would have your inputs in it.

THIS BLOG POST is d answer 2 all ur questions.READ IT!!!

Microsoft Student Partner
Hello there! Welcome to THE blog..the latest buzz in JNCT, bhopal.Starting off,what IS this huge MSP thing which has caught our college off the hooks?
To begin with, MSP stands for MICROSOFT Student Partner. And yes, I am one.
The one question every ones’s been asking me is:How On Earth Did You Become an MSP?Well I chose to write it down once and for all (my throat has begun paining with all the answering repeatedly).Here it is:

Microsoft organized a competition inviting technical students ( passing out in the year 2010 or later), who are passionate about technology, to apply for the Microsoft Student Partner (in short, MSP) examination.By sheer luck,or shall i call it destiny, a generous friend informed me about it.I applied for the exam,got shortlisted,went off to Indore to appear for the next level which was a written test comprising analytical ability,verbal ability,c programming and computer science concepts. Having cleared the writtten test, I submitted my resume and went on for the GD round which lasted for 30 min.The results were declared on the 1st of nov ‘08. And voila! I was chosen as an MSP.

For people who wish to become an MSP,there is always a next exam,to be held next year.For those who dont have the time or inclination to wait for the next year,there is also a wild card entry (it requires a little hard work) wherin you have to participate and drive atleast 10 entries in the IT Challenge Cup.For more details visit http://www.imaginecup.com/ and http://www.student-partners.com/
( Again a Microsoft endeavour, the Imaginecup ’09 finals are going to be held in Egypt. More about it in d next post. Meanwhile it will be beneficial for u to visit the above website.)Having thus become an MSP, my main job would be to organize and conduct seminars in my(yours too, if u please) college ,with microsoft lending its full support obviously.

!!!!ATTENTION FOLKS!!!!
Please Register for any of the competitions on http://www.imaginecup.com/ straightaway. you will be required to fill in a REFERRAL CODE which is as under:
jayachoubey
its easier if u follow the link below:
https://imaginecup.com/Registration/Default.aspx?ReferralCode=jayachoubey
Good Luck!!!!!


But the first and foremost task ahead of us is to build a technical student commmunity in our university. And THIS is where you guys come in.I have spoken to our Head of Department,faculty members etc etc and they is more than willing to lend us support. All we have to do is1. Come together. Irrespective of our streams,sections and grades/years and personal backgrounds.
2. And register! I’ll soon be circulating a list wherein u will have to fill in your basic personal details i.e. name,contact nos. etc(only for the genuinely interested people.no mischief makers allowed here)
3. Donot ask whether our college will give u a certificate for this!! It might , if you insist.AND if we are active members of our communtiy. but one thing is for sure,it will definitely look good on our resume!!! But please, it is high time we stop attaching so much importance to a piece of paper. Instead , look at the other things /incentives it has to offer - ranging from free software downloads to informative seminars to providing our college with an MSDN AA and what not!! (wait n watch!)
4. Contribute in our own little ways- It might be as simple as pinning up posters on the notice board to more complex ones like handling the technical aspects of the seminar arrangements.
5. Inform our friends and colleagues by word of mouth /mail about the new community which we have begun building.
6. Think of a good name for our new technical community. Yes,your opinions count and they are welcome!
Lastly, I’d like to bring to our notice that this is a very low time as far as the IT industry is concerned. We need to rise above our everyday mundane tasks and do something fruitful that benefits us in the long run. The wise dont need to be told twice
Signing off
Jaya Choubey
Microsoft Student Partner
India