Young leaders and innovation: The new 'transformers'

Every once in a while when I have a little spare time on my hands, I like to free surf the web - without any agenda. Inevitably, I emerge inspired at the limitless sea of young innovators, free and fearless minds creating powerful solutions for a new world.

On one of these online strolls, I discovered The Khan Academy, an online repository of over 2000 free videos on subjects ranging from maths to history, biology to finance. These videos are watched 100,000 times every single day, visited by 1 million unique students every month who have learned from over 56 million lessons delivered – for free! The Khan Academy is a not for profit platform, built by a young man named Salman Khan, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate from MIT & an MBA from Harvard Business School who has earned the popular title of “The Messiah of Math”. It has a vision of becoming the world's first free, world-class virtual school where anyone can learn anything – at no cost.

This is just one of the many, many amazing ideas and innovations that our young people are coming up with every day. Today, youth the world over is collaborating and innovating across geographies through online tools and virtual communities. If only, we would stop to listen.

Some of the innovative work being done has been captured by platforms such as the World Economic Forum Tech Pioneers and Young Global Leaders.

In India too, we have read so many examples of young innovators including those of Irfan Alam, the IIM graduate who has created millions of “bankable” rickshaw pullers with his innovative firm Samman, or Indrani Medhi, who promises to exponentially expand the use of computers with the development of a text free interface that could help illiterate and semiliterate people find jobs, get medical information, and use cell-phone-based banking services using symbols, cartoons and audio cues.

We at HCL tapped into some young innovators when we partnered with Management Innovation Exchange, and launched the HCL MBA M-Prize. The contest for B-school students offered an opportunity to develop and define the framework of the organization of the future. We opened the doors to new ideas with a very simple promise: A chance – and a budget - to test the idea on the ground at HCL.

The MBA prize opened a floodgate to draw over a hundred boundary-pushing proposals for changing the way organizations work and leaders lead. I would like to present some of the prize winning ideas we received as an example of how given the right tools and support, today’s youngsters can come up with unique and disruptive ideas.

‘Late Night Pizza: Extending Hackathons Beyond Technology’ an idea from Harvard students David Roth and Alka Tandon won the M-Prize and an opportunity - with a budget - to test the idea on the ground at HCL. As Roth & Tandon pointed out, Tech companies have unleashed the creativity latent within their organizations through “hackathons” - intense ideation events where teams of professionals move quickly from idea to prototype. They recommended a simple but powerful management innovation: Applying this concept in firms outside of the tech space for a low-cost way to bridge the gap between idea generation and implementation.

‘The Organisation Structure as Free Market’ was recommended by Team IMD, which proposed a new management system that applies a free market mechanism to human resource management, similar to what happens in professional team sports. That is, managers get a set of responsibilities and a budget for their team. Based on their style, they can build teams by offering employees a combination of salary, secondary benefits and working style to attract employees to their team. Employees have free choice of who to work for.

The London School of Business team called upon management to ‘Stop incremental change and foster Bold Moves’. Senior managers, they pointed out, are often reluctant to break rank and suggest bold new ways of working, preferring to stick to the safe, tried and tested middle ground. As a result early opportunities are frequently missed and it becomes ever more difficult to initiate much needed change or bold decision-making due to organisational inertia. They proposed that all board papers looking for investment authority or other decision making must include a ‘Bold Move’.

The contest was just one such challenge for students to unleash human capability and foster renewal in our organizations. In the words of Gary Hamel, management guru and MIX director, "old" and "musty" management practices are begging for reinvention.

I believe the power to do so lies with the new transformers - our youth. They hold the power of change through innovation – in management and beyond. Don’t you?