A red-letter day

Today is a truly historic day. Never before has the world looked at Indian business with so much hope, awe and delight. Today TATA motors launched its famed ' 1 Lakh car'. Christened as 'Nano', this 33bhp hatchback with a 624cc engine, is priced half that of the current cheapest car in the market. According to information supplied by the company, Nano has a lower overall pollution level than two-wheelers made in India and the higher fuel efficiency (20 km/litre) ensured low carbon dioxide emissions.

Indian car sales are predicted to more than quadruple to $145bn by 2016. Tata will initially make about 250,000 Nanos and expects eventual annual demand of one million cars. This breakthrough product will surely find buyers in many other markets, including the developed markets for a higher version even if it were to cost $5000 - 6000. Coming to think of it, this fits exactly with the idea of how radical constraints can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new solutions, which i had covered in my earlier post on Evan Williams

Are we therefore at times limited only by our thought? ...

My salute to everyone at Tata Motors who made this possible.

Emerging trends

Vinay Dixit from GM had recently asked this question on LinkedIn, and got responses that included the following interesting ones apart from the usual suspects:

1. Corporates exploiting social networks to a greater extent
2. Greater environmental consciousness and related opportunities like carbon trading
3. Re-birth of the family unit
4. Increasing co-creation of brand value by engaging consumers
5. Standardised global accounting standards
6. Expanded awareness horizons - global concerns competing with local / national issues
7. Collective intelligence e.g. blogs, wikipedia
8. Shorter product life cycles
9. Culture as a leveler over economics

The ones that i contributed were:

1. ‘Security’ will emerge as a strong human need – physical, psychological, emotional and social
2. Environmental consciousness amongst consumers will rise and this will benefit brands that advocate the cause
3. Education will emerge as a new big opportunity especially in countries like India and private businesses will join governments in driving this.
4. Simplicity and ease of use in case of technology products will become increasingly important as technology gets more complex.

How to be a better trend spotter?

Had recently asked this question on LinkedIn and got some interesting feedback. Toby Younis, President and Principal Consultant at B2B Marketing Pro based in Washington D.C., shared his approach which i thought was very systematic. Trendwatching site also has some tips for the interested.

There's a lot that one can learn in this area and i will come back with some more understanding.

The accidental innovator

Check out this interesting article on Economist online on Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and Twitter. The article talks about how Evan stumbled upon both ideas. Evan believes that radical constraints can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.