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Nurture Innovation, Make Entrepreneurs: Victor Mieres
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National Instruments is trying to help aspirant entrepreneurs reap the best out of technologies and set up successful businesses. Victor Mieres, vice president, sales, Asia, National Instrument, shares with EFYTimes.com the company's vision of making this world a better place. Read on ...
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Saturday, August 09, 2008:
NI, the abbreviation for National Instruments, has another interesting description -- nurturing innovation. This is an highly ambitious initiative that NI has taken up to make this world a better place. This is further boosted by the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) initiative that the company is working on.
The company is trying to help aspirant entrepreneurs reap the best out of technologies and set up successful businesses. There are many good examples where NI worked with an aspirant, a single man show and has emerged as a full-fledged firm.
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There are many such stories to learn from. On the other hand, the STEM initiative is helping students get access to technologies and build a future. But what all is working behind all this? What is the vision behind initiatives like Planet NI and STEM, and how can you join the bandwagon and become a successful entrepreneur or contribute to the development of the world? We spoke with Victor Mieres, vice president, sales, Asia, National Instrument, on phone and this is what he has to share.
EFYTimes: Planet NI is an interesting name -- Nurturing Innovating. And then there is STEM too, let's start with NI. How is NI driving these initiatives and what is the vision behind this?
Mieres: Our vision is to make the world a better place. We want to empower scientists and engineers of the world, who in turn help empower the local community and thus make this world a better place. This is a chain, a pay-it-forward kind of cycle. Considering the fact that we have been doing this for many years, what we have found is that this is something we actually need very much. And I am glad to share that we have been very successful in that. There is a very large group of people who want to do the same thing -- to help make the world a better place. There are entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists and many who may probably be working for smaller companies which cannot really afford that.
We have seen that there are a lot of people with capacity to innovate, to give solutions to a lot of problems. But owing to some limiting factors, they are not able to do that. The primary factor being affordability. And in a way that is a loss. We want to make sure that affordability should not be limiting factor to acquiring of technology for further growth. So, we came out with Planet NI, nurturing innovation. Our vision is to provide access to our products and governance over the capacity to afford those products. One thing that is needed the most to achieve is the product that is heart and soul of our company: LabView product. We figure out ways to provide access to these technologies to those companies who are looking for it.
EFYTimes: How do you actually help such companies?
Mieres: We don't have a framework in position yet. What we are doing is to listen questions from people and see what they want to do. Then we figure out what they need and how can we help them. Sometimes the tool itself is not enough, they require training and coaching as well as to how to use the technology. What we would like to do to address this is marshal the pattern of our employees who would like to dedicate their time to help those companies. There can be third-party companies, our partners, even passionate customers who would like to dedicate time of their employees or even contribute in other ways to the cause. So, it's a participatory approach.
EFYTimes: Whom do you want to help?
Mieres: There are millions of SMEs out there in India but we are naive enough, at this stage, to try to help everybody. So we want to focus on those companies who have scientists and engineers. So in a way we would like to help technology companies and their engineering departments. It could be structural engineering, chemical engineering, water treatment plant or it could simply be monitoring, for instance, and measuring and analysing environmental data for plantation or jungle. So we will focus on people who we know we can help best, and these are the scientists and engineers of those companies.
EFYTimes: What kind of SMEs are you targeting?
Mieres: When we came up with this vision, we had a very broad view. But now we realise that there are many SMEs who are in areas where we cannot help them with our products. So, depending on the response we got, we found manufacturing as a growing area in India which is quite diversified across the country. It is interesting that the machine builders, people who are adding intelligence to machines, are automating all machines and that is an early market in this domain. So, manufacturing and machine is our target sector.
EFYTimes: What is your parameter for SMEs?
Mieres: We go by the definition of the government. We are not economists so what we are doing is to see how government defines a unit as SME.
EFYTimes: But when we talk of the SME segment, one thing that surfaces is the challenge they face?
Mieres: The biggest challenge is knowledge of technologies; they may not be aware of what all technologies are available. That is one piece, and that is one of the reasons we are talking to people, putting it out there and let people know what can be done. Then, of course, the number one restriction is availability of funds. And that is why we would like to focus on affordability of a product. Many of the SMEs are not enough motivated about the newer technologies, and they use something which is very much old and that's where they require training.
Our tools are software tools which do require training, and we empower SMEs to use them, but then they don't have enough time to sit down and learn new technologies. Or perhaps, they don't have these workers or engineers who can actually take this technology and apply -- they may not even hire those people. Another fact about SMEs is that most of these are led by one man, and that person walks on a kind of tight rope. He is very careful in going for something that is new. So we have to be pragmatic as to how quickly they can use the technology and be successful. They have cash flow problems and also they have little time to talk to someone in a very generic terms of why technology is good. They want the impact on ROI through that technology right away. These, I think, are some of the challenges they face.
EFYTimes: What kind of challenges do you face while interacting with SMEs?
Mieres: As a multinational, we are very comfortable working with large multinational customers. In India, large enterprises and governments have dedicated teams of engineers for analysing technologies. These kind of customers require some turn-key solutions, very specific products; so in these cases, it is easier for us to learn their language from their perspective and deliver. But in the case of SMEs, as I told earlier, things are completely different.
EFYTimes: How do you plan to educate them?
Mieres: Get them young! If they have the knowledge of how to use a tool, they will be able to apply those tools quickly when they get into those companies. But we, of course, are very pragmatic. We know it's very difficult to do that. But the fact is universities are like incubators where they allow their students, at the expense of university, to try out ideas and use technology to solve other different problems which India faces. May be that is the time to approach them -- they are passionate, they are not cynic, they have a little bit of time to try out new things -- so that is the best way of doing it.
We have a very well-organised and passionate group of people who are willing to go ahead and encourage the use of our technologies in the area of education. This is a very new idea, and we have seen the passion of our employees wanting to help. Ans as I said, there are partner companies, some of our system integrators, even our customers donate some of the time of their employees. We could conduct workshop and provide training, in a very inexpensive manner, to those companies who would need that help.
EFYTimes: So have you also tied up with universities?
Mieres: In this framework, we have not started yet. What we can tell is we have over years worked really hard on our connection with the universities. So we have few things we can share. We have Centres of Excellence or virtual instrumentations -- Centre of Excellence where universities get low-cost versions of the software at a very reduced price and the hardware required to enable those universities to conduct experiments. There are many engineering colleges around the country which concentrate on education as theory as oppose to a more holistic experiential education where they actually buy the technology and learn by doing. We have tied up with 240 universities around India where they have this Centre of Excellence.
EFYTimes: What kind of students do you look at?
Mieres: Historically, our focus has been graduating engineers who are working on their final projects and are more advanced. Now, lately, we have opened option of new versions of LabView that actually allows people to run maths scripts. It can now be used earlier in their career including the first year when they are learning tools for modelling and simulation. So, it really spans the whole curriculum of science and technology. From year one to post graduate studies.
In India, we have a dedicated team of professionals whose sole job is to work with the universities and colleges across India to tell them about our technology and how our technology can help those colleges graduate to produce scientists and engineers. The way, we think, we can do that is by enabling those colleges to actually have practicals. We emphasise on experiential education. To try to solve real problems in lab environment.
We launched an initiative under planet NI to help specifically these small and medium enterprises. We have four machine manufacturers who took advantage of the offer to gain access to our technologies, and we have some nice write-ups on what they have done.
EFYTimes: Do you have a dedicated division which pushes the NI initiative?
Mieres: No, right now we don't. We are doing it within the current framework of the company. But we are very happy to see the team of NI taking its time in working towards that vision and helping others. I believe we might actually come out with a foundation, if we get traction with this. It would basically be a non-profit foundation with NI's support as the founding member. Of course, there will be our partners and customers. We could actually make a sustainable plan for the next few years.
EFYTimes: Any deadline for setting up the foundation?
Mieres: We are going to see what kind of response we get. We are right now talking to our partners, and if this is something that has legs, we will put it up on foundation. In the meantime, we will continue to work with the NI resources.
EFYTimes: Now the last question which was going in my mind for a while. How can an aspiring entrepreneur who is reading this interview can contact NI to know more about the initiative?
Mieres: They can just send us an e-mail at ni.india@ni.com. We have evangelised the plan NI internally and aggressively. So any query will be taken care of appropriately and proactively.
-- Swapnil Bhartiya, assistant editor, EFYTimes.com
Swapnil Bhartiya, EFYTIMES News Network
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