MHRD Innovation Cell organized a webinar as a live You Tube session on 15th May, 2020. The Leadership Talk was delivered by Dr. Lakshmi Meera, Program Director, Forge incubator, Coimbatore on the topic “Innovation Risk Diagnostic — Product Innovation Rubric(PIR)”.

In this session Dr. Lakshmi Meera made the audience understand the different risks inherent to Product Innovation and how one can validate the true market potential of the product innovation. She explained the fundamentals of Product Innovation Rubric (PIR) so that one can apply this diagnostic tool to evaluate and assess the potential of the Product Innovations and to gauge its progress. She explained how one innovator/entrepreneur can apply the tool to innovation to understand the fast-tracked process of validating inherent risks in the product innovation by linking it to customer motivation, customer-acceptance, and customer-commitment.

Dr. Lakshmi Meera talked about a case study by a student entrepreneur in Protosem program at Forge. They wanted to find an innovative solution to the following problem: Due to the close proximity to forest regions, constant human and elephant conflicts leads to death of both human and elephant life. The farming lands in the region are regularly invaded by the elephant subjecting to heavy crop damages. The initial PIR score was 18 when they hardly did any customer interaction. Later they went around, had more and more customer interactions to validate their solution value proposition and through iterations and refinements increased PIR score to 44 and finally to 86. They kept updating PIH with number of customer interactions/validations. So customer motivation, commitment and acceptance improved the PIR score. Forge has trained 10,000 student innovators and 500 educators on PIR tool. In her concluding remark Dr. Lakshmi Meera said that as a partner incubator to many academic institutions Forge provides support to create an adjunct innovation practicum that can be integrated with 4 year engineering degree program or 3 year science degree program which will help all of us to unleash latent potential in the campus to redefine future of our country with Make in India journey.