7 Sutras of Innovation by Nikhil Inamdar (Book Review: 3.75*/5) !!!

12th Book of 2020!

So finally, I get Work from Home facility which has come up as a Speed-breaker to my reading marathon in this lockdown period. It took me 5 days to complete a book of 264 pages which I had targeted to complete in a day before WFH came into the picture. Anyway, there are still 12 days to go before we are back in the World hopefully living the way we were so I still have time to read with a better management along with office work. This time I completed reading “7 Sutras of Innovation” written by Nikhil Inamdar along with the association of Marico Innovation Foundation. The book’s tagline on the cover page says “Stories of Scale-Ups that are Transforming India”.

This book basically speaks about the 7 Sutras needed to be taken care for an entrepreneur or an organization wishing to do something innovative and new. Within the starting few pages itself, you are introduced with these 7 Sutras which makes you curious about what else shall the book discuss in further 250 pages or so. But from here author picks 8 Global Firsts and Game Changers who followed whatever they could from these 7 Sutras and applied in their process which made them the success they are. The name of these organizations are Goonj, Forus Health, Tonbo Imaging, The Better India, Agastya International Foundation, ISRO, Rivigo and St. Judes.

All these 8 institutions are awarded by Marico Innovation Foundation for their innovative capabilities. Author, in each of these chapters, begins with the person’s vision who first thought of opening an organization of the kind and then discusses the challenges the company faced in establishing itself. Author also talks about their specialty which made them distinct from others. In the end of each chapter, author points out specifically the number of Sutras the company followed and how. As all these organizations are very different from each other, anyone who has an innovative spark or entrepreneurship goal shall get to learn and analyse a lot as to how these pointers can be applied. These Business Insights are a great work which makes the title of the book justified. Also, this makes you understand that howsoever different the sector of an organization could be, just by following the same Sutras, each one of them can succeed.

Now, talking about the drawbacks of the book, I must say that the biographies section doesn’t elaborate a lot about the founders and the company but only gives us an overview of the same. It would have been great if we got to learn a lot more about each one of them. Secondly, I felt that the Sutras that author ticked for each organization in the end were sometimes not very well co-ordinated as to what was described in its biography section which surprises you sometimes as to when was this followed by the organization. Thirdly, in the paperback copy that I received, few pages were inserted in the wrong order which made my reading experience little difficult.

Overall, this book is only for the entrepreneurs or the aspiring ones who understand the game otherwise this book shall not be very helpful for you. I give this book 3.75* out of 5.

Thanks.

WRITING BUDDHA