Red Dot Blog

Hello EY, we are Red Dot!

July 8, 2022July 11, 2022
by min lee

We are excited to announce today that our team is being acquired by EY!

This acquisition fits into EY’s move to grow its strategy practice and serve clients more holistically, by designing and delivering transformative strategies across the entire enterprise.

Five years ago, we founded Red Dot with a mission to bring transformation to Mauritius, and it has been an incredible journey working with leaders, their boards and their teams to re-imagine complex challenges.

Our goal was to build an entrepreneurial and impact-focused consulting firm that offered a Silicon-Valley innovation focus to business strategy, and combine it with a strong execution focus, to help clients bring innovations to market quickly, while empowering people and building capacity across their organization. We are grateful to have worked with some of the most imaginative clients, been privileged to work with their eager teams, and lucky to have built a network of global partners with rare skills.

At EY, we’re excited to support our clients with a strong global team, and start scaling our work across the EMEIA region. We are also very passionate about building a pool of talented individuals in Mauritius that enjoy doing hard things, and who are attracted to deliver impact to clients and to the World.

We could never have done this alone, and would like to extend a special thanks to all our clients, their commando teams who were curious about trying something new, their excos who took a chance on an eager new spirit of innovation, our loyal staff who took such a deep interest in our clients, co-workers, our global expert partners, our wise advisors, and our friends and family who have trusted us, encouraged us, and supported us throughout this journey.

We also have special thanks for our co-founder Natacha Emilien, who was by our side since we started Red Dot on Flic en Flac beach, where we mounted our first Post-Its on cardboard boxes from our move (our first whiteboard) in our small apartment (our first office) to build our first sprint backlog. Little did we know where that would take us!

We are at once humbled, thankful, and hopeful that we are now starting our best work yet, and look forward to building a better working world with EY!

A platform makes things better for more than one

April 21, 2021April 21, 2021
by Natacha Emilien

Think of water. Fresh, clean water. Once upon a time, one would have to dig a hole on ones land, and hope for the best. Over time, communities dug a common deep hole, called a well, and shared the water.

This was one of the first platforms, as it provided a shared resource to many people, and despite purity, taste and availability being highly variable, it made things better for more than one!

Today, the CWA operates a national scale platform to supply clean drinking water to the whole country. Without the CWA, every family and business would be extracting, purifying and filtering water all day. The CWA therefore makes water cheaper, faster and better (and safer too), saving people time, money and allowing a standard metered service, to businesses and families.

One might argue that every religion (making a way of life better), every political party (making representation and governance of the people better) and even every football club (making enjoyment of a sport better) is a platform too.

In this article, I’m going to talk about Digital Online Platforms, as that’s what you’re using right now, and- unless you’d like to start a new political party to do good- digital platforms can bring benefits pretty fast.

What’s a digital online platform?

A digital online platform, quite simply, allows an exchange to take place online.

Facebook is a social platform, as it allows people who want to share ideas and people who want to hear ideas and react to them, to exchange ideas.

Amazon allows people trying to buy things and people trying to sell things to exchange goods and services online. Such a platform is usually called a marketplace.

Note that Amazon allows not only buyers and sellers, but people who write reviews about products, and people who transport goods, to do their work more easily, to make the exchange of goods and services even faster, cheaper and better. Amazon is a true example of a multi-sided marketplace.

Why are platforms important for small businesses?

A platform is first of all a good tool. A good tool always provides this benefit: small amount of effort in, large amount of value out. That’s called leverage.

A platform allows multiple users to enjoy this leverage. A well-designed platform provides more leverage to each user, as the number of users grows. This is sometimes called a “network effect”. It might be the reason that you installed Whatsapp. As your friends and family are on Whatsapp, it’s worth installing, so you can communicate with them where they are already hanging out. And you joining Whatsapp made it more valuable to them.

There are many reasons to love platforms, but my favourite reason is that platforms allow smaller companies to enjoy cost savings, market opportunities and other things that are usually enjoyed by larger companies.

As a small business, how do I get started with platforms?

To get started, you could either make use of an existing platform, to enjoy benefits for your business, or even build your own platform!

You could use someone else’s platform

An existing digital online platform could be as simple as Accounting software in the cloud, that you might pay a monthly fee to use, or even an account on a marketplace, allowing you to sell your goods to a ready audience.

But here’s where you could get very creative. Could you repurpose a “traditional” existing platform to achieve leverage, at very low cost but with enormous benefit to your business?

A platform doesn’t have to be beautiful. It just has to deliver consistent benefits!

You could build your own platform

Do you do something better, faster or cheaper than anyone else? If so, could you make this available online to serve your customers even better? Or maybe your suppliers? How about your competitors? You get the idea. As a platform owner, you have access to incredible power.

In my next article, I’ll dig deeper into this, and share a framework to get started, and some inspiring stories.

Homework (for those who want to get started)

Until we meet again, here are some of my favourite readings, that I hope you might like.

Derek Sivers is a personal acquaintance. A musician who simply wanted to sell his CDs online. Except that there were no platforms that did that, at the time. Here’s the story of how he built CD Baby, that allowed anyone anywhere to order a music CD (and not just his music CD) and have it delivered to their door.
If you’re in the mood to go in deep, Platform Scale by Sangeet Paul Choudary explains how small businesses can compete with large ones, through platforms
If you want to know about how platforms make money, check out Matchmakers by David S Evans.

By Alam Kasenally

Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Red Dot

Should we even have this meeting?

July 30, 2019July 31, 2019
by Natacha Emilien

In my previous life as a manager, then a corporate executive, I made a curious observation: I noticed myself staying later and later at my job, as I climbed the rungs of seniority. I used to stay until 8:00 PM, 9:00 PM or even 11:00 PM to “catch up” on urgent tasks. I thought it came with the territory of being more and more important. But then I thought “Wait a minute. My two young kids are paying for this.”. On investigation, I discovered the innocent but insidious culprit: The Meeting. Like a chump, I’d been duped into one meeting after the other, thinking that “back to back meetings” were a badge of seniority. I then realized that all my productive work began at the end of my workday: when my children were fast asleep.

I left my last corporate job and co-founded Red Dot 19 months ago, and entrepreneurship has really helped me rethink the value of every single minute of my day: I wish that I had reached this level of time consciousness earlier, and that I now can bring more people along with me on this journey.

At Red Dot, we believe that our country needs to focus on growth more than ever before, and that, equipped with innovative and entrepreneurial mindset and methodologies, any organisation or individual has the potential to thrive and actively contribute to the growth of the local economy. However, there is a catch there: people in Mauritius always seem to be too busy to strategize, to think about growth, to innovate!

When I ask them why, our leaders reply: “I’m a professional meeting-goer. I am stuck in meetings all day/ all week/ all month!”, “we always stay longer than expected in meetings, and then we have to reschedule completely our calendar for the day!” or “frequent but useless meetings that stops me from doing our real work”.

Indeed, much recent research shows that managers spend between 35% to 50% of their time in meetings (and that doesn’t even include all impromptu gatherings that don’t make it into the schedule), while roughly 50% of all meetings are considered wasteful or unproductive. Moreover, it has been proven that time spent in “bad” meetings is seriously impeding the motivation, creativity and productivity of teams.

Meetings should be like salt- a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation. – Jason Fried

Reading this, one might argue: “why don’t we start by simply reducing the number of meetings?” The way out of this “meetings trap” is to ask a simple, powerful, yet difficult and rare question: “Should we even have this meeting?”.

To help you answer this question, we have designed a useful poster to put at your desk, or on the walls of your meeting rooms, and we strongly invite you to download, print and use this poster with your teams! You can also reach out to us for our upcoming Run Great Meetings public workshops.

Hey, don’t get me wrong. I am not saying all meetings are useless. There are indeed many great meetings I have been attending in my career, and particular since we started Red Dot, at the end of which everyone feels energised, with clarity of mind, and total readiness for action: for example, Creative Brainstorming meetings, or Problem-Solving meetings, when they are thoroughly prepared, well run and timed. In those kinds of meetings, I never leave the room with the impression of having wasted my oh-so-precious time.

Now, take a few minutes, and imagine you had a magic wand that could erase all useless meetings from your calendar for the next 12 months. What would your life look life? What would you do with the spared time? What if your could keep in your calendar only exciting, engaging and impactful meetings that would boost and empower your team to think big, strategize, ideate, and take your best decisions?”

This is my sincere wish for you.

Have a nice (and hopefully meeting-free) day ahead 😉

What’s the big fuss about Data Science?

June 14, 2019June 14, 2019
by Noorie Karimbocus

You might be wondering what all the fuss is about with data science, constantly hearing buzzwords like AI and Machine Learning; your Analytics team is already doing really well. Your team very ably pores over databases worth of information, generates important insights about your business, and compiles dense reports regularly. You might even run some of these data analyses yourself.

Whilst these reports are important and support you in making business decisions, they tend to focus exclusively on the past (e.g. did I meet my quarterly budget?). The reports might also be largely descriptive, without any guidance on what you should do in the future. On the other hand, we all know how, in this VUCA environment, the ability to predict and prepare for the future gives businesses the upper hand.

The power of data science as compared to data analytics comes from its ability to forecast, i.e, in helping people make decisions about the future. Using “algorithms”, you can now look at what has worked about your business in the past, and know which knobs you must pull in the future for the optimal outcome that you want: both for your business and your customers. At its core, data science allows companies to better pre-empt their own resource needs and/or their customers’ needs. This could lead to budget savings, higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The UK-based retail giant Tesco tracks fridge temperatures across its thousands of stores to identify which ones will need servicing, allowing them to proactively engage maintenance services, thus minimising the time any fridge is out of use. In turn, this improves customer experience within Tesco.

It is all well and good that a giant like Tesco can do this. But, you might be thinking, what about my not-so-giant company in Mauritius? Is my data big enough to be as valuable?

It turns out that data science does not require Impossibly Huge Terabytes of Data to deliver results. Any hospital or clinic in Mauritius can use data science to improve its patients’ experience by monitoring their waiting time within different departments, and matching this to doctors’ and medicine availability. That way, the hospital’s operations are optimised.

A Mauritian retailer can achieve efficiency and customer satisfaction through data science by tracking the quantities and types of products sold to its customers, and linking this back to the associated inventories and delivery information. Even further, the retailer could use data science to personalise its services to each customer. By monitoring customer purchase habits, a retailer could send a family nappies before their baby cries, printer ink before the report is due, or even ice-cream when you’ve had a bad day (now that’s a little creepy, but possible).

At Red Dot, we firmly believe that data science is the next frontier of innovation. We are committed to helping organisations work smarter, and get smarter about better serving their customers. If you are excited about what data science can do for your business, and would like to explore how Red Dot can help you, give us a call!

In our drive towards building data science know-how on the island, we are also hosting Dr Ragu Bharadwaj from the MIT Sloan School of Management next month. Through data science, Dr Bharadwaj has helped Fortune 500 companies identify and solve high-value problems across sectors as diverse as banking, agriculture, pharma, logistics and aviation, helping them capture millions of dollars of value in the process. He is hosting a 1-day interactive workshop on data science on the 4th of July 2019. Find out more information about the workshop here.

Making sense of Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile

March 6, 2019
by min lee

These days, it seems like everyone is talking about innovation and new ways of working. We hear of many organizations “going agile”, sending more people to “design thinking” courses, and trying out “lean startup” practices.

While we drown in these buzzwords, it seems like many people are confused about when to apply these methods. Where do these methodologies make sense? And how do they fit together? Let’s try to make sense of it all.

These modern innovation methods are part of human-centered innovation, which is the discipline of developing solutions in the service of people.

At its heart, the innovation sweet spot is to strive for DESIRABILITY (what customers love), VIABILITY (a sustainable business model), and FEASIBILITY (what is organisationally and technologically feasible), with the accompanying methods mapped as follows:

Design Thinking is a method that solves for desirability. By putting users at the centre of the innovation process, design thinking enables you to explore the opportunity space, and discover unique insights on WHAT will delight your users, so you can be sure that your innovation is going to be adopted.

But how do you know that your innovation will actually make money? This is where Lean Startup comes in to solve for business model viability. By testing various business models with real customers in rapid iteration, you quickly discover which business model survives, and become smart about what to actually build so that your innovation is financial sustainable.

Finally, we have the help of Agile methods to launch an innovation in small and rapid increments. This mindset helps you bring an innovation to market in weeks instead of years, allowing you to get your products and services in the hands of customers faster, before your competition.

It is important to understand that while these methods are complementary, they solve for very different things. Here’s another way to look at these methods:

In the early days of corporate innovation, we observe many companies that adopt agile first, and agile only. They have the agile manifesto plastered on their walls, cross-functional teams that are disciplined with stand-up meetings, a grand KANBAN board, and finally launch a mobile app quickly (relative to corporate timelines), only to be disappointed that no one seems to be using it. This is a classic case of not discovering desirability.

We have also seen a few examples of companies who are supporting a sexy new digital service that is in fact haemorrhaging cash behind the scenes – this is often because their business plans are mere projections made in boardrooms, informed by high-level market trends, without ever going “out of the building” to test if these risky assumptions actually hold up in the real world.

And without agile, we see highly energised innovation teams coming up with the most remarkable prototypes, only to find them getting stuck in corporate bureaucracy, as operational units are too busy with “other priorities”. A couple months later, they see their competition launch something similar, which is a sure-way to kill their motivation to bring up anything new again.

But for companies that master human-centered innovation, the rewards are enormous. Here we see design-led companies outperform others on the S&P by over 200%. McKinsey also has a fantastic report on the business value of design. The best news is that these methods are simple, fun, and provide a framework for repeatable innovation. It has never been easier and more accessible to start investing in these new ways of working.

Confused about Digital Transformation? So was I.

October 8, 2018June 14, 2019
by Alam Kasenally

Digital Transformation is the order of the day.

Yet, we use words like “digitization”, “digitalization” and “digital transformation” interchangeably. Is “Digital Transformation” the new website? The Mobile App that the CEO has been asking for since the last board meeting? Or maybe even that expensive CRM that’s going to cost this year’s IT budget? Even within industry, there’s lots of debate, so confusion is no surprise.

We thought we might try and simplify this for everyone, so here’s how we see it:

Digitization is the process of going from analog to digital, and in the context of a business process, could be a synonym for process automation. So, for example, instead of manually issuing paper invoices, you might use Excel, or you might invest in an ERP to automate this process. Note that the customer isn’t involved here.

Digitalization goes a step further. This involves the use of digital technologies (and data) to change existing business models, thus unlocking new customer value. An example of this is a traditional retailer launching a new e-commerce offering, with targeted promotions based on data from a loyalty program. Note that while intimate knowledge of the customer is helpful here, you can get away without it (and some do).

The most challenging part of Digital Transformation is the Transformation piece. This refers to infusing a new set of values in the existing workforce, that enable the delivery of products that customers love. You might have heard of terms like human-centered design or design thinking, agile or lean startup methodologies which are common organizing principles in a digital transformation journey. Key features of such a way of working are: no-silo thinking (enabling innovators to work in cross-functional, high-performance teams), focus on the customer (through design thinking tools), data-driven decisions and speed-to-value delivery (or continuous customer delivery). What is called for is a fundamental change in leadership, culture, and the day-to-day running of the organization.

At Red Dot, we specialize in this transformation, and enjoy working with leaders who have the courage and ambition to lead this systems-level change. As those of you with Smartphones might know, if you don’t upgrade your mobile operating system regularly, you soon won’t be able to run more and more of the apps that you absolutely depend on. Transformation to the new company operating system is key for sustainable digital innovation.

And finally, a fun little digital story:

Dr Richard Earlham spent 5 very calm and serious minutes in his fine, wood-panelled surgery asking me questions about my symptoms. He then stood up and said “Very well, young man, I will now proceed with a digital examination.” Being a software engineer, I was thrilled and asked whether a computer or maybe a scanner was involved.

“No”, he said, as he put on a huge stretchy rubber glove. “Digitus is the Latin word for finger”.

So, what’s your understanding of “Digital Transformation?” And how has the experience been for you? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!

Eski to ene JACK? Are you a Jack?

June 26, 2018June 26, 2018
by min lee

After publishing our last article on “How to Design a Culture”, the biggest reaction we got was this:

“I like what you’re saying, but it sounds so easy for you guys. You are designing a new culture from scratch! How do I build an innovative culture in a traditional organization, when there is a lot of resistance to change? You know, in Mauritius, there are a lot of people who are just working for a paycheck, waiting for pension payout, or who are so comfortable and set in their ways, that they just don’t want to change! Whereas others (like myself) understand that we really need to change, to be able to improve and stay competitive and even relevant, in our industry!”

Well first, congratulations, on wanting change. The good news is that it is possible. The even better news is that you can lead this change, no matter who you are.

The first thing to understand, is that in any organization, your entire population of employees will typically fall along this curve:

I know what you are now thinking. That in YOUR organization, it probably feels more like this..

The biggest mistake you can make, is trying to work on the majority, or even worse, the resistors. This completely drains your time and energy, and more critically, any sliver of hope you have left in your bones. Successful change-makers know that:
1) change starts small
2) change takes time
3) change begins with ourselves

The key is to first find the Innovators in your organization. These are what we call (in creole) bann JACK. They may sometimes be the CEO who has such a bold vision that nobody thinks it is even possible, or that manager who doesn’t toe the line and is often seen to take some personal risks, that millennial in your team who has somehow managed to introduce a small recycling program in your office, that front-line staff who found a better way to automate her workflow so she can do less admin and spend more time with customers, that technician dude who didn’t even complete Form-4 but somehow finds a way to fix everything that is broken (although not very beautifully!). These are all real people that we have met in Mauritius.

The JACKS are all around us. What we love about innovation, is that it is accessible and inclusive – education level or rank is never an indicator of our ability to innovate.

In general, we find that innovators have these qualities:

Joyful, optimistic and hopeful about the future
Activated, go beyond what you are “paid to do” and care deeply about something
Curious, not afraid to ask questions and challenge the status quo
Kind, shares and collaborates to help others grow
Solution-focused, comes up with constructive ideas and never makes excuses

Find them. And then create activities that get them WORKING together on something the group collectively cares about, and don’t just talk about it. Even without management support, this could start as informal activities such as creating a football team to promote a more healthy lifestyle, doing anonymous small acts of kindness to bring positivity in the office, participating as a team to a blood donation event, or starting a forum to share innovation successes and failure stories!

One of our favorite examples of this, is how a group of young civil servants in Singapore (who met at a Hackathon) felt so constrained by government bureaucracy, they started their own informal group called the under-gahmens (“under governments” in local slang, witty name!) as a magnet for other civil servants across various agencies, to work directly with communities in a more empathetic way.

If you have CEOs or managers who are also JACKs, you’re in luck! Take the opportunity raise a more formal project (e.g. digitizing core workflows to reduce paper and make your operations a lot leaner, or organizing a cross-functional group to tackle a strategic project to enter new markets, or create new products). You may even be able to negotiate a bonus for your group if you successfully complete strategic projects that affect the bottom line 😉

We found the JACKs in every organization we interacted with, and decided to bring everyone together, every month. We’ve had three Innovators Meetups, getting the JACKS across government, corporate, and social sectors.

Eski to ene JACK? (Are you a JACK?) Leave your email on the right to get updates, and come by our next meetup because there’s a community waiting for you!

How to design a culture

March 27, 2018
by min lee

A mentor once taught me that there are three levels of management:

人管人: People manage people
制度管人: Systems and processes manage people
文化管人: Culture manages people

There’s a full Chinese quote for this espoused by a Chinese company – “人管人累死人, 制度管人烦死人, 文化管人管灵魂”. Loosely translated, this means “When people manage people, people get tired to death. When systems and processes manage people, people get annoyed to death. But when culture manages people, it touches their spirit”.

The highest level of people management is through culture. Unfortunately, many companies leave culture to chance. Culture is one of those things in a company that are shaped very quietly but quickly, accumulating through every conversation, every decision, and what we unconsciously choose to put attention on. And culture is hardest to change once it is formed.

On our second day of starting Red Dot, our core team had a conversation about our values and culture, which lasted 6 hours into the night. Before this discussion, we had done an individual reflection of our personal ways of working – identifying what makes us come alive, and what completely drains us of energy. And from that, we found common ground to honour each other’s working style so we can all be at our best.

We then did a powerful Culture Mapping exercise, with slight modifications. After mapping out outcomes and behaviors, we discussed various company practices we wanted to adopt based on these values, so that our culture is not incidental, or just something we put on a wall or talk about, but becomes intentionally lived.

Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first. -Simon Senek

What emerged was an exciting tapestry of 5 core culture values that now defines the essence of the Red Dot culture:

Positive
This was an interesting one that emerged after a lot debate. A couple of us had initially written “FUN” (in capitals) on the wall, as it was important to us that this journey was enjoyable and engaging, and ultimately fun. We then realized that “fun” is highly subjective, because different people find fun in different things – while our idea of fun might be to read a book or bring good people together, others might expect a party and booze.
Digging deeper, we discovered that what we valued was in fact, was Positivity – the practice of seeing the best in every person and situation, that invites possibility. Positivity is reflected in the energy we bring into the room, to the quality of our questions, to having generative conversations. Positivity is a stand we take in the world, and at its root is grounded in trust, caring, and gratitude.
Impact

Impact is the reason why we started Red Dot, and requires us to do what is right rather than what is easy. We like taking on bold projects, and enjoy working with partners with the same shared sense of ambition and integrity.
Impact might seem very exciting and loud on the surface, but in fact, requires a very quiet quality of inner cultivation and contemplation. For sustainable and meaningful impact requires deep personal and social awareness, to choose wisdom in our decision making, and to act from a foundational place of honesty and integrity. This might be the most difficult of all our values, but is what makes the journey most worthwhile.
Entrepreneurial
Entrepreneurship is in our blood, and this value surfaced early. We are energized working with others who are not afraid to take risks, who don’t ask for the rules but who make the rules, who challenge the status quo, and who are ruthlessly resourceful, finding many ways to get hard things done, and in a smart way, not just by working harder. Tip: this is something we test a lot for in our interviews.

We hire people onto the team who are, or would like to be entrepreneurs, and offer Red Dot as a stepping stone in their journey, giving a high level of ownership and mentorship to discover what it takes to be an entrepreneur, and to take ownership of a part of Red Dot that is in line with their personal calling. It energizes us to see people grow and flourish into their own.
Curious
Curiosity is the birthplace of insight. A beginner’s mind requires humility: questioning our own assumptions, discovering our blind spots, and always be experimenting and trying things out. In a fast-paced startup, we find ourselves short of time to ponder, reflect, and contemplate. What has been useful is practicing “reflection in action” – the ability to reflect on one’s thinking while acting. Doing this intentionally and sharing our learnings as a team, allows us to look for the larger picture that lies beyond our individual perspectives.

We take great inspiration in building a learning organization from The Fifth Discipline – “Learning in this context does not mean acquiring more information, but expanding the ability to produce the results we truly want in life.” It is lifelong generative learning, and learning organizations are not possible unless they have people at all levels who practice it.
Excellence
We expect every company to have a vision, but do we have a vision for ourselves? We ask for this personal vision at the start of every interview, because we believe it is important that we understand each other’s dreams and goals, invest in each other’s growth, and develop our own personal and professional mastery. We believe that a company only excels, when its people excel.

As a team, we implement the same practice of excellence using a system of Objectives and Key Results (called OKRs). This method was first practiced by Intel, popularized by Google, and is now the standard practice of many tech startups. We love it for its simplicity and agility (OKRs are reset every quarter with new information), and to communicate and monitor our goals and progress. Designing our own OKRs was a challenging but enriching process, as it forced us to think about high-value activities vs. just “checking off traditional KPIs”. It has helped us stay focused, be accountable, work smart, and get organized with a series of coordinated actions among us where the sum of our individual contribution is greater than the whole.

And yes, all our OKRs are fully transparent to everyone in the team, tracked on google sheets in real time, and it’s rewarding seeing our progress indicators turn from red, to yellow, to green!

Two months in, we’ve seen these practices go from our discussions and into our decisions, which is where these values really come alive – Do we take on this project? Do we hire this person? Can we find the courage to be honest with our client? These choices shape our culture, turn into stories that become baked into our institutional memory and legacy.

Also, little did we realize, that these five culture core values spell out the word “PIECE”, I guess that’s what it means to be a little PIECE of Red Dot! If you’d like to join our tribe, check out a few positions we’re hiring for.

MRIC Event: Promoting and Managing Innovation

March 15, 2018March 22, 2018
by Alam Kasenally

On the 1st of March, I was invited to present my views on Innovation at a panel hosted by the MRIC. I attended as coach and new Director of Turbine, and also co-founder of Red Dot.

Our guest of honour was Mr Jerry Godwin, whom I got to know over coffee afterwards. Our guest had spent five weeks in Mauritius, as part of the Fulbright program, and had been advising the University of Mauritius on the opening of a new Research Incubator in Ebene.

Drs Bissoonauth and Gopaul, chairs of the meeting, had prepped me before the event and encouraged me to choose a topic of interest to Entrepreneurs, Intrapreneurs and also SMEs. Having reviewed the slides from last year’s workshop, I noticed that the top answer to “Barrier to Innovation”, in the MRIC’s survey, happened to be cost. So, I called my presentation “How to Innovate on a Budget”.

The event was well-attended, with about 100 SMEs, Managers from larger companies and also Entrepreneurs in attendance. Of particular delight was Mr Chris Gunnoo, a high-school Computer Science teacher who was buying robots out of his own pockets to inspire his students. Mr Gunnoo is the reason that much innovation can come out of a high school, and the seed for a strong innovation culture in the first place.

My classmate, Avinash Meetoo had accompanied the Minister of Civil Service, who gave a speech before we did. Jerry opened, and told his amazing story of being an entrepreneur in Washington DC, which had no entrepreneurs when he started in 1999. Jerry explained how he built a local ecosystem, through systematic public-private partnerships, and a network of five incubators. Bruno Dubarry, co-founder of the Association of Mauritian Manufacturers (that owns the “Made in Moris” brand) presented some fascinating slides on how he got local manufacturers to chart a roadmap, through a Design Thinking Process. Anibal Martinez (founder of Careerhub) presented some fascinating statistics on the labour market.

In my 15-minute intervention, I had a vast topic to cover, so focused on stories that I thought might engage the audience. The book “10 types of Innovation” presented a great frame for the discussion (and for the panel later in the day). You can find the slides here:

Next, came a joint panel. Questions from the Audience included:

“How do you protect ideas from being copied?” (we all were a little stumped: Mauritian Intellectual Property Rights doesn’t cover patent IP but trademarks for the moment, though Jerry did mention that a framework was being developed for Intellectual Property)
“What if people don’t believe I’m making the right decision by becoming an entrepreneur?” (this question was asked by a former UoM professor-turned-entrepreneur)

The News on Sunday interviewed us, and published a nice piece. I believe I was so hungry at this point that I gushed out without much structure. There’s always a first time, I guess, even for interviews about Innovation.

The most exciting session was after lunch. Anibal, Jerry and I were each assigned a table, with about 20 attendees, and asked to run a forum. My table included 6 SME entrepreneurs, 10 company employees (including two thoughtful visitors from Air Mauritius and the UoM), students and managers.

Our theme was “Managing Innovation”, where we were asked to discuss “Planning Innovation”, “Managing Innovation”, “Innovation Teams” and “Tech in Innovation”. Quite a lot of touch points for 40 minutes! Fortunately, our forum “team” helped me. The 6 Entrepreneurs seeded a discussion, and finally most people at the table spoke up about their various interesting experiences, and these were the most memorable ones:

Our Big Company representatives noted that often junior employees are never solicited as a source of Innovative ideas, despite being close to the customer. Surprisingly, it was suggested that CEOs are afraid that their ideas might be “too expensive”!
Our SME members (three of them from South Africa!) felt that in Mauritius you had to be an accountant and a lawyer in order to hope to start out as an entrepreneur. Many agreed that a more frictionless experience (comparable to Singapore) would be helpful
I noted that setting up Red Dot needed about a month’s paperwork. An entrepreneur at the table mentioned that many aspiring entrepreneurs are discouraged by struggling with the paperwork for 6 months, and end up not starting up!
There was a passionate discussion about Labour Laws, which all agreed are a legacy of another era, and penalize inexperienced startup founders. Larger companies have strong HR expertise to allow them to navigate incentives without appearing in Labour tribunals
There was a lot of laughter about the use of Machine Learning in interviewing candidates, and queries about whether privacy law would allow scanning a candidate’s emotions. Turns out, privacy law doesn’t cover what you can and can’t do with a video, after the subject has given you consent to record her!

What made me most happy is several members of my table asking for us to be connected on email to continue the discussion. I commend the MRIC for bringing together a diverse set of people to discover and find solutions to a set of complex challenges. Bringing diverse experiences to one place, ensuring each voice is acknowledged, and respectfully considered, is the basis of good facilitation. Keeping the conversation alive, with concrete action, and elicitation of the right questions is the basis of good community. Bringing good people together is the basis of nation-building. Thank you MRIC.

Vive Moris!

March 12, 2018March 12, 2018
by Natacha Emilien

I am Mauritian. Mo ene morissienne. I know my country and its people, I know its limitations, but I also know its untapped potential. And this is precisely why I can talk about our need to innovate, as a country.

In Mauritius, when we think about innovation, we visualise a lone genius (a Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs type) coming up with an amazing idea out of the blue, which will completely disrupt the world and change billions of lives around the globe. We hear stories of young technology geeks in the US making significant discoveries or developing amazing new products and becoming billionaires after a few months, and we wish we could do the same. However, most of us Mauritians are working in private organisations or in governmental bodies where, well… (and it’s so unfortunate) we can look right, left and center, it’s difficult to see or imagine any of our current colleagues becoming the next Zuckerberg!

We therefore tend to see innovation flourishing in countries like Silicon Valley, China, France or Singapore, but we tend to stay quite pessimistic when it comes to rethink our own country in terms of innovation: “we need to take into account the local political/economical/social context of Mauritius”, “we need to be realistic, we are far from being Singapore”, “how do we even start?” or “let’s start with a first initiative by copying that idea I read about, then we will see if it works”.

Today, we are celebrating the 50th year of Independence of our country. We can choose to focus on the recent political scandals, or our slowing economic growth rate, rising consumer prices or pick any social and environmental issues we care about, but I hope we choose to focus differently.

The capacity of the human mind to build innovative solutions, that address human needs globally is endless. Think of the iPhone how it allowed the smartphone to create a massive impact on humanity. Think of inventions like Skype coming from small countries like Estonia. Invention needs no land, labour and capital, which are traditional constraints. Innovation’s only constraint is creative, and we as a nation are some of the most creative people on the planet.

Today, I see a lot of my compatriots claiming their love for our country and voicing out their pride to be Mauritian. And I hope that beyond today, we can continue to focus on what we love about Mauritius, all the inner capabilities of our people, and how blessed our country is. When we start to see these problems as opportunities, when we ask “why not?” and “how might we be part of the solution”?, we all become innovators.

Vive Moris! Happy 50th Independence Day Mauritius!