Creativity, Innovation and Incubation — Summer 2024

Explain Following

1) Define Business Angels 2) What is Incubator Associations 3) Draw Idea Funnel 4) List down types of Innovations 5) Give two examples of Services Innovation 6) Define Technological Discontinuities 7) Define Entrepreneurial Creativity

Differentiate between creativity and innovation and list myth surrounded around for creativity

State any four business incubator player and their roles and responsibilities.

Discuss idea generation process and role of brainstorming and also state the enablers and barriers to creativity and ideation.

Does time pressures effects creativity? How to eliminate that barrier? What are steps for increasing your own creativity?

Discuss the role of Academics, academicians and consultant in business incubation with suitable examples.

Describe enablers and barriers to creativity? What are the recommended steps to enhance individual’s creativity?

How innovations can be commercialized and moved to markets to create business out put ? Can stage gate systems help ? Also brief about state gate system

Describe models and strategies for Market timing for innovations with examples.

Why Change is essential in business? Why it’s stated in business that “Change or Perish” – Critically evaluate , the need of change in business profiles.

How strategic Management of technology should be done ? Does that support the business in being Agile and support to extend the growth phase ?

State 5 Examples of technology maturity and technology obsolesces.1

CASE OF STC Saudi Telecom Company (STC) is a frontrunner in telecommunications and a national pioneer in digital enablement. It maintains an overarching presence in the MENA region and is purpose-driven in delivering world-class ICT solutions for industry verticals, including Fintech, Media, and Cybersecurity. Today, STC is trusted worldwide for steering transformation through innovation and digital leadership. STC launched InspireU as part of its social responsibility and firm sustainability commitments. It is a startup accelerator targeting financial, administrative, and technical assistance for budding entrepreneurs and SMEs. Since its inception, InspireU’s performance has been impressive, launching over 70 startups and generating 600k+ employment locally. Now, to build on the success and help InspireU play an affirmative role in the nation’s bold socio-economic reform measures, STC intends to completely digitalize the startup onboarding and mentorship cycle with improved outcomes. Business challenges As an initiative, InspireU is wholly aligned with STC’s stated purpose of enriching people’s personal and professional lives. Seeking collaborative growth at the confluence of financing, ideas, and technology, it soon clocked over SAR10bn ($2.67bn) in financial transactions. However, as InspireU grew in size, buoyed by a surging startup culture worldwide, maintaining its peak performance involved resolving the following questions: How to seamlessly automate the journey from participant application, screening, mentorship, and idea evaluation to the seed capital allocation, reducing the turnaround time, eliminating bias, and improving user satisfaction? How to deliver end-to-end visibility for the management team using analytical dashboards, fostering informed decision-making practices with assured transparency? How to replace InspireU’s dependency on third-party tools like Wufoo, Calendly, and Dropbox with bespoke and localized alternatives that line up smoothly with STC’s newly adopted cybersecurity protocols? These alternatives must be turnkey solutions offering end-to-end functionalities, eliminating the earlier need to use multiple third-party tools for a single job. How Did Piserve Addressed the Issue PiServe consultants conceived a comprehensive solution roadmap built around STC’s own Data Center. The team proposed a microservices-based, three-tiered architecture that catered to the localized hosting requirements, resolving possibilities of conflict with the latest corporate cybersecurity guidelines. It gathered requirements in an Agile Model and submitted the Functional Specification Documentation and solution wireframes for client review. Once approved, PiServe’s designers and developers commenced the project in Agile Sprint. As part of the engagement: The Java Spring Boot framework has been used for building the backend, pacing up the development of web apps and microservices, and simplifying configuration2 The frontend was built using AngularJS, making it possible to design rich, interactive features for the website and the user app within a single framework MinIO, the high-performance object storage, has been leveraged to provide a fast and efficient file repository for the solution Customized solutions were built to replace InspireU’s integration with third- party tools like Wufoo, Calendly, and Dropbox The result The solution was developed with high fidelity to STC’s expectations, serving as a digital gateway to InspireU. Here, STC stakeholders and startups can interact, collaborate and share inspiring ideas on building the next Unicorn. But what exactly did the PiServe engineers bring to the table that transformed a predominantly manually-driven, high-toil environment into a thriving epicenter of growth?