iPod-wa mil gawa!!

Beta, aaj tere pitaji yahan hote to kitne khush hote.
(koi nahi, Jaipur mein khush ho lenge)

I participated in the essay competition of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in December. The topic was - "How can strategic innovation be applied to solve real-world problems such as corruption?" and the competition was open to only Bangalore people. The first prize was a swanky iPod Nano and I think the second prize was an iPod mini. I sensed an opportunity and muggofied things about Strategic Innovation and penned an essay for them. I had forgot about it amidst all the turmoil of last 2-3 weeks. Now the luck has turned again (I think with such a start of the year, it can only get better :). The results are out and my essay took the second place! One more thing to boast about in my IIM interviews :-). The essay -

Any company has to make strategic decisions on three basic levels: (1) Who are the customers? (2) What values are to be delivered to them? and (3) How to create them? All firms try to answer these to optimize profits. To outsmart the competition the only way isn’t to just play their game better, one can always bent the rules or introduce new rules of the game. It is known as Strategic Innovation.

Though practiced vastly in the corporate world, Strategic Innovation is just as relevant in solving the real world problems. We just need to put the real world problems in the right perspective. Let’s the example of a government, as a firm which is trying to provide various services (What) to the citizens of that country (Who) through various processes (How). Now we can start the analysis to explore the three-dimensional equation looking for gaps which can be exploited.

Taking a further narrowed example – corrupt traffic police is a quite common nuisance in the urban life. Let’s tackle this problem borrowing the ideas from Strategic Innovation. The firm here is the traffic police which is trying to provide smooth traffic & ensuring vehicle security on roads (What) to the citizens (Who) using their numerous procedures (How). Corruption is highly prevalent in the checking & fining process, i.e. when a motorist is found guilty and is asked to pay bribe which is less than the fine. In such a case, the bribe goes into the cop’s pocket & the motorist had to pay a lesser amount. The fact that both the parties are better off by paying the bribe, makes is all the more dangerous situation.

Since the What and Who aspects of the equation are pretty much invariant in this case, we need to analyze the How part. Since making a challan and fining the motorist doesn’t provide any incentive for the policeman, providing some share from the daily fine collection to the duty officer should provide some motivation to fine rather than accepting bribe. The risk attached is minimal, since no documentation is done. The risk can be increased by surprise inspections. The punishment for anyone caught red-handed should be severe so that the risk involved outweighs the reward. The motorist too should have some incentive to demand the challan - tax exemption on the amount paid can be introduced. Implementing such ideas should reduce corruption by some significant degree.