Creativity and Innovation

During my last visit to the 75th IAC, I saw a strong contrast between the creativity and innovation of some companies. Here's what I think about this problem, that is prevailing in our startup community:

Most of the R&D community in India lives in the software industry's philosophy, where your product is enough to scale your business. Once it is launched, you can run ads and gain customers, with easy profits in just months of launching. The Silicon Valley of India is a predominantly software-based community, to be honest, which is the best thing that could ever happen in our IT era. But now as it is time for us Indians to shift into the manufacturing and R&D business area, there is a tendency to follow the software contemporaries' philosophy. Most of us have heard Sam Altman's statement about launching a product. While I respect him to the fullest, I cannot agree with his quote on launching a product and gaining viewership, based on my R&D approach. But for the software industry, it is truly said.

In the Indian R&D community, there are a lot of product manufacturing and R&D happening, which are mind-blowing, to say the least, but the problem is the creativity. Not the creativity in making the product, but making it publicly accessible. The aim of a company should be to emotionally connect with the people, who don't have a single idea of what you are talking about. Yes, this sounds nonsense, but this is what Apple did with the Macintosh advert during the Super Bowl halftime. Now, people would argue that there is no relation between a layman with a launch vehicle and a satellite, but that's what attracts the next generation to do it. We should always remember that for D2C companies there always exists a future customer in the form of a layman. Creative advertising with good social reach (mind you, not social media). What I mean to say is, to know the people better, spend some time with them, and make their lives better. All the big companies as we know now, aren't made in a single day, nor did they become billion dollar companies in just months after their product launch. It takes years, with different products and failures, cause that is what R&D is!

It is a thing to fantasize, to work for and dream together. For what we are now at this moment took years, and greed of early profit is often fatal for most companies. Creativity can survive without innovation, but innovation cannot survive without creativity.