Puneet mentioned to me about Ideawicket yesterday (he probably read about it in BusinessToday). The portal does a great job in making the intent of the website clear in one line - "Provide ideas and innovations to corporations for new & improved products, processes & services."

Basically it is a place where an individual can post his ideas of something that can help companies expand their business or better their processes by introducing efficiencies. So in case you say the sentence "they just don't know how to do business" a lot...may be this is the right platform to suggest some ideas and who knows some corporation might like your idea!

Companies, on Ideawicket, can also initiate the discussions by holding innovation contests. Actually this idea is not a new one. As I had mentioned in my book review of Mavericks at Work, the book cites examples of 2 companies that have been formed to tap the R&D resources outside their research labs and they have been pretty successful in interfacing the researchers and the companies!

Ideawicket's interface is pretty good and it is probably a good idea too. But what I would like to see in such a portal (and I'm giving out an idea that I have been thinking for quite some time now :-)) - is how can people through interaction make a good idea into a great one. What I mean is - such a portal attracts people who have the quality of thinking "outside the box" quality in them...right? So why not tap into the collective intelligence of all such people into making an innovative idea into a killer one!

In such a forum the focus will not be how many news ideas we can come up rather the focus will be to harness the wisdom of crowds. So it is of immense importance that such a portal also has specific groups that users can form and work as a team to convert an innovative idea into a practical one. Thus it would be the power of communities that will drive the ideas rather than random individual contributions.

Read this good news on HindustanTimes. Actually I feel that students in India need this the most. The education system, mostly, is pretty obsolete and students, specially in the rural colleges, don't know how they can shape their career during college or more importantly what all different opportunities lie ahead of them.

When I was at school, we always used to talk about that we lack "exposure" to career options as they were only limited to engineering (if you were from Maths background) or doctors (if from biology background). We used to look up to the students in schools and colleges in metros in India with some sort of inferiority complex. And actually this feeling of lack of "exposure" was pretty valid too. There was surely a lot of information asymmetry.

Internet, I feel, has the capability to do both...divide this information gap as well as fill it too (and that too quite easily). Therefore it is important that right from the student days, one is able to understand the potential uses of internet and reap its benefits to the fullest extent.

I picked up this book at this book was authored by the editors of FastCompany magazine and I have been following FastCompany blog for quite some time now and have liked it a lot. And let me put it at the start itself - I loved this book!

The book his divided into 4 sections:

Rethinking Competition - Explains how it is extremely important for companies to have a cause for which they fight. As today it is very easy for other companies to copy what you are doing, it is this zeal to fight for a cause beneficial to the customers in your niche market that will matter the most.

Reinventing Innovation - This primarily focus on the "Wisdom of Crowds" concept that is gaining momentum ever since the success of Wikipedia. This book has some superb examples to prove how it is extremely important for every the large R&D powerhouses to constantly look for and leverage the huge intellectual pool outside their research labs. Actually after reading Mavericks at Work and Wisdom of Crowds, I am really looking forward to reading Starfish and the Spider (already bought) and Wikinomics (waiting for the Indian edition)

Reconnecting with Customers - This section starts off well with the all important question - for the part few decades business has seen a lot of great R&D products, great advertisements, skillful advertisements and marketing tactics as well as cheaper ways to build and market products. The only thing that has degraded is the all important customer service. The book has some great examples of companies that have tried to connect with their customers in a very personal ways.

Redesigning Work - Examples of great working environments where employees have transformed their workplaces into a learning university. How companies attract talent and respect their employees and pass on the companies' values to the employees in a way that the employees understand them and the customers are able to clearly view it in the way these employees work and interact with them.

Towards the end of the book is a long list of maverick material for readers to research more on the aforementioned topics and it is pretty useful.

I simply loved the examples from 32 maverick companies through which the authors have tried to put their ideas across and prove as to why constant innovation is required for today's businesses to be successful.

You can read an excerpt of book - here.

You can go through the list of maverick companies featured in this book - here.

My Rating: 5/5

Amazon Link: Here

Fabmall Link: Here

So there are communities and networking websites on any theme possible. Yesterday I found EducatorsLog.in and found it pretty useful. It is basically a platform for educators in India to "connect, share and grow". If it reaches out to the right audience (i.e. the teachers and educators), it can certainly aim to raise the bar of education in India. And that's a bit "if" as internet penetration is still low in India and I am not too sure about how many people in the educational circle use internet pretty regularly.

But the idea is a simple and useful and also there is some pretty nice content on the website right now. Any once the word spread around and people come to know that there exists a platform for them to learn more and spread what they have learnt, certainly EducatiorLog.in will grow and hopefully fulfil its aims.

Actually today through this website, I got to know that ISRO has started its own institute for providing undergraduate and post graduate courses - http://www.iist.ac.in. And more interestingly the admission process is through IIT-JEE!

So NDTVJobs seems to be first big job website in India to introduce referrals to help recruiters better search for candidates.

Actually referrals are not totally new to job websites in India...the first I heard was MohanChoti. But NDTVJobs is the first big portal to take this bold step which is quite different from what other big players in the Indian job market like Monster.com, TimesJobs.com and Naukri.com are doing -- which is basically selling resumes and paid posting for job openings (the former contributing to a major portion).

I have given thoughts to referrals quite a bit and I think this concept is pretty interesting and if implemented well by job portals, it can be very useful:

Job seekers:

Candidates will certainly be able to make themselves stand out based on exceptional hard work and commitment that they might have shown in previous projects compared to simply being lost in thousands of resumes and profiles of people with same/similar educational qualifications, certifications and job experience.

Employers:

Referrals can surely make companies search profiles of millions of job seekers much better. I don't know how NDTVJobs will implement referrals but the kind of way I look at referrals, and perhaps the way we would try to implement it for students registered on UniversityHiring, is less granular. So people can certainly post testimonials about their friends/colleagues, but they should also be able to rate them on their technical skills as well as soft skills. So for example for a software professional, one should be able to rate his/her colleague on C++Java skills and also qualities like leadership, communication skills etc.

So these will provide more search fields for the recruiters to filter the results to better fit the profile of the ideal candidate they are looking for.

The other superb thing that referrals will do is to make it more difficult for people to fake their profile. This is one of the biggest problems facing portals like Monster and Naukri. A couple of months back a leading newspaper (probably Times Of India) had a lengthy article on this menace. Actually this is one of the biggest reason, the way we have architected our UniversityHiring placement management portal for educational institutes. We haven't opened it to general public (though its free for all students/colleges). Instead a college as a whole can use it under the supervision of a placement coordinator (generally a faculty member). This tackles the problems of duplicate and fake resumes extremely well. Couple this with referrals and user corrected information and we should be able to catch even the minutest fraud soon enough.

Job Portals:

Makes the job portal more sticky as people will surely want to keep their profile updated as it would be helpful to them at a later stage when they would be looking for a job. Plus they would regularly be requested by other people for referrals/testimonials etc. So if I may use the term "social networking" again -- a social network will be evolved.

Nonetheless as with all user contributed content, the usefulness of referral network will depend a lot on the implementation and the way that it will prevent/correct fraud referrals etc.

So I have my fingers crossed on this one and also looking forward as to how Monster/TimesJobs/Naukri will respond in the future with a similar strategy.