Mohmed Khan
Global Leader of innovation, Unilever
Mehmood Khan is Global Leader of Innovation Process Development at Unilever. For Mehmood, what has become prevalent in innovation is the issue of sustainable value creation. Unilever’s award-winning approach to this has seen Mehmood take all stakeholders into account in the product lifecycle.
No longer are Unilever solely thinking about the internal players within the product lifecycle. Rather, Mehmood now considers all stakeholders who were previously not involved, such as suppliers, customers and universities in driving Unilever’s innovation process.
Mehmood Khan has been a fellow traveler of Indian Design for a long time. Over thirty years ago Prof. Ravi Mathai established the Jawaja Project, a collaborative venture between the NID and the IIM focusing on achieving self-reliance through self-education, Mehmood was a student participant on this project. He has applied learning from Jawaja project to his project in Mewat.
Day 2: December 13th, 2007
Breakout Session: Round 3
Strategic Innovation
2:30 p.m. - 3:10 p.m.
Collaboration, Co-Creation, Creativity ,Experimentation &Imagination
Design in action project in Mewat region Haryana (India)
Background
This project started taking shape based on some random discussions which were followed by some random actions.
Objective of Project:
1. Using methods learned from the corporate world to bring about mass scale changes in rural Mewat.
2. Making change felt at a mass scale and in a manner that can have a fundamental effect on the communities involved around the world
3. We all can make this world a better place by working together collaboratively and finding common areas of interest for creating win- win situations. It does require imagination, creativity and experimentation.
This presentation is to share some of these experiments and ongoing learnings
• Experimentation as way of building excellence
• Leveraging goodwill
• Stretching Imagination
• Sharing of joy and enthusiasm
• Finding good people
• We live in Globally interdependent world and with lot more virtual connectivity
• Deep insights necessary for building healthy platforms and business models
• Shared values and beliefs :Value based relationships are likely to last longer
• Experiments with a Design in mind are good to try as options
• 360 degree Stakeholder involvement brings the spirit of Co-Creation and Commitment
• Bureaucracy needs to be managed via senior Stakeholders
• Co-creation leads to shared ownership
• Ideas need space, time, experimentation, passion, and will to grow
• Collaboration relationships need to be built by providing time, actionable outcomes, respect and a fair way of treating partners
• Diversity of minds, gender, nationalities, cultures and functions bring lots of creativity to difficult issues/problems
• Villagers themselves have lots of ideas and bit of facilitation does wonders to build their confidence and to put them on path to self reliance
• Imagination works wonders when it is followed by actions which start showing measurable progress
• A Holistic journey plan is a good way to make sense of all the experiments
• Catch them young for building loyalty
• Technologies, Micro-credit, latest management thinking, creative problem solving, collaborative ways of working are all necessary for removing illiteracy, ignorance and poverty
• Working collaboratively we can make the world a beautiful place to live in for ourselves and for future generations
