In 1978, I was just a small-town boy with big dreams, trying to find my way in Delhi. After facing rejection from nearly every school I applied to, I felt lost and unsure of my future. But my mother, an eternal optimist, wouldn't let me give up. "Get up," she said, "we’re going school hunting." With no plan, we set out, visiting school after school.

I’ve always struggled to understand innovation. Does it happen through a structured process, or is it intuitive? Can you train yourself to be innovative, or is it an inherent trait? Is it a habit, an art, or a combination of all these? My journey over the last 40 years has been an exploration of these questions. I’m still trying to figure it out.

Fresh out of business school, as green as spring grass, I found myself at the helm of a sales team in the cutthroat Mumbai market. The good news? I had a team. The bad news? We might as well have been selling snow in Siberia—our product wasn’t catching on, and our rivals were outpacing us tenfold.

In 2005, as we steered the transformation of a legacy company, our success hinged on securing new customers. In one fierce competition for a significant contract in Europe, our prospects seemed dim. Yet, I’ve always believed that adversity breeds innovation, and this time was no different.

It was a scorching June in 2014 in Patiala. I stood sweating in a stifling classroom, trying to persuade government school teachers to embrace a new teaching method. Decades of failures hung in the air, visible in their sceptical glances. Feeling humbled and slightly desperate, I gambled on ‘Banana Technology.’