PAVAN SONI Corporate Strategy & Policy

Statement of Purpose

I want to be a teacher. I believe that teachers are the single most important catalysts of change in

any society. Innovation being closest to my heart and been associated with innovation for past

five years, I believe that I can be a good scholar of Innovation Management. Over the years, the

access to the worlds of academia and corporate has helped me shape up my research agenda

around innovation. It will be more specifically on Creativity and Corporate Innovation

Management. I would further want to investigate into the role of tools and techniques in

managing a systematic Innovation Program.

My professional experience at Wipro and other consulting assignments have been very useful in

shaping my research agenda. Here I would want to highlight my passion and relevant experience

in teaching. The demanding job at Wipro and family commitments doesn’t keep me away from

my interest in teaching over the week-ends. Ranging from the B-Schools to Engineering

Colleges across India, I lecture at a host of institutes. My focus is on teaching under-privileged

students at Tier- II engineering colleges and management institutes. The subjects I do research

and teaching on are: Technology & Innovation Management, Design and Creativity. Cases on

how organizations and individuals have made an impact by challenging the best practices and

adopting the next practices form the core of my cases. I have developed my own course content

assimilated from various formal and informal sources. This assists me do study on often ignored

areas, such as: Social Entrepreneurship; Role of Creativity in Society; and Innovation in

Education; amongst others. My work on ‘Innovation in Education’ got me invited to speak at the

prestigious TEDx at BITS Goa in early 2010. There I discussed about the journey of an idea

from ‘Mind to Market’. Often I teach students who are quite elder to me, but that age gap never

comes in the way of teaching and learning. It only gives me more confidence. A running

compendium of my research activities is maintained at my blog- www.pavansoni.net. It is a

channel through which I propagate the concepts and learning to an audience which is far and

wide spread.

At this juncture, I have made up my mind to engage in research on a full- time basis. Now it is

the calling of true love. I wish to invest the next few years into getting focused and obtain a

Doctoral Program from a coveted institute. I am interested in learning about how sustainable

innovation happens in a corporate context and how the innovation ecosystem works, not just to

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PAVAN SONI Corporate Strategy & Policy

generate ideas but also to shape those. Focus would be on innovation in emerging economies

where technology access is often limited, yet talent is richly available. I have been studying

about Open Innovation Models and Client Centric Innovation Models in past. My work on Open

Innovations got acknowledge by IEEE at the IEEE International Conference on Management of

Innovation and Technology (ICMIT) in 2008. Further, my research on Open Innovation and the

resulting non-linear growth was also featured at the 5 th ASIALICS International Conference at

IIM Bangalore in 2008. On Innovation Models, I presented my paper on Client Centric

Innovation at the Asia Strategy Summit held in October 2010 in New Delhi. The paper discussed

the various elements of an innovation model, including: Idea Lounge, Systematic Creativity

Workshops, and a Joint-Innovation Council.

It is well known that research is a factor of ecosystem. I am keen on being associated with an

institute that gives me an opportunity to conduct research in a greater depth, yet be connected to

multiple disciplines and groom me as a first class researcher. IIM Bangalore appears at the top of

my list of the institutions where academic rigor constantly meets practical application. I see a

good alignment between my interest in innovation and one of the core research areas at IIM

Bangalore– Corporate Strategy & Policy. The institute has arguably one of the largest faculty

strength in the space of management and strategy. The recent work done at the institute indicates

a lot of research around institutional innovations, especially in influencing the culture of

innovation. The researchers of the likes of Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan and Prof. Ganesh Prabhu

have been leaders in the space of innovation and entrepreneurship, and had seminal contribution

to the field. Further the work done at NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning and the

collaboration IIM Bangalore has to the leading academic institutions is an additional motivation

to engage with the coveted institute. With my experience and passion in the area of innovation, I

am confident of bringing freshness to the existing research. In the end, I thank you for taking

time out and considering me as a potential researcher at your esteemed institute.

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