The fast-moving presentation slides wait for nobody at a Pecha Kucha night, finds Akhila Seetharaman.
Attend a Pecha Kucha night and you’re in for a series of sexy, sped up lectures – there’s a rhythmic change of slides in the background every 20 seconds. Literally translated as the “noise of chit chat” from Japanese, Pecha Kucha nights began in 2003 in Tokyo among designers who wanted to share design ideas through presentations in a relaxed after hours atmosphere.
The only rule – 20 slides, 20 seconds – ensured that each presenter stuck to the programme and kept presentations to a manageable six minutes forty seconds each. The format was attractive and caught on. Today, it’s spread across 280 cities including Bangalore. “I like the format. It makes you define the story in a certain way. For once you’ve got to think like an artist, presenting your idea in a very visual way,” said Gaurav Mishra, CEO of 2020 Social, a social media platform that builds online communities. Mishra, who has participated in Pecha Kucha night in Washington DC, will speak at the next such event, organised by the Centre for Knowledge Societies and Jaaga in Bangalore this fortnight – the theme this time being Indian innovation stories.
Presentations will include ones on mobile applications, online communities, telemedicine and other new entrepreneurial ventures. “There’s been a lot of discussion about where innovations that are changing the global scenario come from and the common perception is that much of major innovation is US-driven,” said Saswati Saha Mitra, research and design head of Centre for Knowledge Societies, Bangalore. “On the one hand you’re talking about emerging economies, and then you’re saying that all major innovation comes from the West. We believe that there are equally interesting and challenging innovations happening in India.”
As India faces challenges, not only in terms of infrastructure but also information access, mobile phones have become the platform of choice, she said. Caller ring tones, pre-paid connections and dual SIM cards – they’re all uniquely Indian innovations in the telecom sector, added Lalit Bhise, founder of Mobisy, a mobile applications company with customers like Nokia and Idea telecom. “Telecom is one area where India is not only a market leader but also at the cutting edge of innovation,” said Bhise who will speak on the Indian mobile ecosystem.
Other speakers will focus on areas that lie in what’s termed “bottom of the pyramid” or sectors in which the underprivileged operate. “We have many innovation stories in India, especially targeting the bottom of the pyramid, including Indian railways computerised booking system and the distribution of FMCG products in smaller packages,” said Sunil Maheshwari, of Mango Techno, which develops high-end applications for low-end instruments. “The field of innovation is a way of thinking and it’s there in your mindset. If a worker cleaning a wall without proper tools uses available material differently, that’s innovation. If you find many workers having the same problem, you could convert this new low-cost way of cleaning the wall into a new tool.”
Mishra, of 2020 Social, who has built online communities, plans to share what he thinks entrepreneurs can learn from activists: how to engage people without spending money, how to move the focus from your organisation to bigger social objectives and finally, how to build an ecosystem where you can give things away for free and yet benefit in the long run.
Both Mishra and Saha Mitra believe that the key to sparking innovation lies in bringing people together to interact on the same platform. “How does one take price levels down without sacrificing quality? Value-added services but may not necessarily be of interest. How can services, like healthcare for instance, be designed better to be made more accessible to people and how can information be shared using open source, collaborative design?” asked Saha Mitra.
Answering these questions would require a range of inputs, she said.
Source : Time Out Bengaluru ISSUE 1 Friday, July 23, 2010
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