Thursday, September 09, 2010
NIIT's CEO Thakur
The other is even more interesting. It [is based on] ... the Hole-in-the-Wall experiment, [in which a scientist] set up a computer [on an outside] wall of one of our software factories, which was adjacent to a slum. He observed the behavior of the slum children when they saw this computer sticking out from the wall. To his amusement, he found that, within a month, without any formal education, these slum children were actually surfing the Internet. He came to the conclusion that there is a much better method of imparting education and he coined the term Minimally Invasive Education. In traditional education, people are put into classrooms. This experiment found that if you provide children with the tools they are able to learn by themselves. This was a very interesting concept, which was deployed in rural education. We set up these kiosks on school playgrounds and [they included] nothing but computers. That was another strong initiative.
Arvind Thakur, CEO , N.I.I.T
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(NIIT)Thakur: Our whole move to make our business nonlinear meant that instead of just providing services, we needed to provide complete solutions, where a good part of the solution knowledge was built into the intellectual property. With SATS, we actually built the cargo ground handling solution, which has been very successfully deployed in Singapore's Changi Airport. For the past 10 years, we have been supporting, enhancing and building in all the features that I just talked to you about. We have a deep understanding of that application. We then entered into a partnership with SATS [saying] 'Here is something that's working extremely well for you. Can we take this intellectual property and build services around it and implement it in other airports? Obviously, it's your intellectual property so you will commercially also benefit from this partnership'.... We took that IP and we implemented it in Taiwan, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Bangalore and, more recently, in Indonesia and Vietnam.
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Arvind Thakur, CEO , N.I.I.T
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(NIIT)Thakur: Our whole move to make our business nonlinear meant that instead of just providing services, we needed to provide complete solutions, where a good part of the solution knowledge was built into the intellectual property. With SATS, we actually built the cargo ground handling solution, which has been very successfully deployed in Singapore's Changi Airport. For the past 10 years, we have been supporting, enhancing and building in all the features that I just talked to you about. We have a deep understanding of that application. We then entered into a partnership with SATS [saying] 'Here is something that's working extremely well for you. Can we take this intellectual property and build services around it and implement it in other airports? Obviously, it's your intellectual property so you will commercially also benefit from this partnership'.... We took that IP and we implemented it in Taiwan, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Bangalore and, more recently, in Indonesia and Vietnam.
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Labels: Knowledge at Wharton
