A thought on innovation by Arun Sarin

On April 16th, Arun Sarin, ex-CEO of Vodafone delivered a keynote at Haas. He shared with the audience his views on the new state of the world, leadership and innovation.

Regarding the latter he noted how innovation this days can arise anywhere in the world and presented an interesting concept: boomerang innovation. Boomerang innovation consists on sending ideas and being prepared to receive them back.

Mr. Sarin illustrated the concept with an example regarding deployment of telecom infrastructure. Vodafone's HQ made a proposal to their subsidiary in India. The Indian team could not implement the recommendations due to lack of resources. Nevertheless, leveraging on the power of scarcity they came up with an improved solution that eventually became the company's benchmark for that particular process.

Constraints are a powerful way to come up with creative solutions. We tend to do our best when resources are scarce and we are forced to work around problems.