Founder & CEO, On2Cook India Pvt. Ltd.
Welcome Keynote by Prashant Shah covering Sanandan Sudhir
o2h group is delighted to have Sanandan Sudhir on stage. Sanandan is an inventor at heart, helping businesses develop their product ideas from a thought to a successful business. Complete focus on IP strategy, product design, development, manufacturing and online and offline marketing. Have to build one of the best - IDEA to MARKET companies in the world.
About Sanandan Sudhir
Sanandan Sudhir, founder and CEO of On2cook India Pvt, delivered a keynote at the 2022 Collaborative Innovation Conference hosted by o2h group. He discussed his experience seeking incubation for a patent at IIM Ahmedabad in 2010, stating that the ecosystem at that time was focused on apps and the suggestion he received did not align with his invention. He said he later founded a services company called Invent India, which has filed 60 patents. In his remarks, Sudhir emphasized differences between global and local markets, arguing that products should reflect local ecosystems, cultures, and philosophies. He described his approach as "a local way of looking at the global technology" and encouraged expanding knowledge beyond what is already known to generate innovative ideas.
Transcript (22 segments)
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Host0:08
Almost delighted to have everybody back after two years. The vision of O2H is to see new ideas, and it's a collaborative endeavor. We're seeding ideas by sharing ideas with each other inside O2H and new thinking, but much more than that, we're about sharing our ideas and learning from the community at large, from all the different sectors. And that's why we call this the Collaborative Innovation Conference, because it's impossible to seed a new idea or do anything innovative or creative without the compound effect of working as a community. So with that in mind, I'd like to firstly tell you a little bit about the agenda today. We've got a talk on investment landscape, then a talk on culture, organization design, and we then have a conversation around the future and the age of biology and chemistry. We'll even be talking about how technology can help us in our climate endeavors towards net zero. We'll then be looking at the difference between Making in India and Design in India later in the day. I'd also like to thank our sponsors: BLD Farmer, Charted Speed, GLR Innovation, Cooling Trade Services, Sacha Meth Infotech, and TDI Chemicals. A round of applause to our sponsors! Without further ado, I'm delighted and it gives me great pleasure to invite Sandy up onto the stage to give the keynote. He's got a phenomenal track record in design, innovation, creativity, and facilitating collaboration. He's a champion of exactly what this conference is about—working together towards innovation, creativity, design, and developing intellectual property collaboratively, new ways of doing things. He's very passionate about how we can move towards design, make, plan, think, and create in India. A huge O2H welcome for Sandy, please! Welcome to the stage.
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Alyssa3:10
Ready to kick off! Of course, things are looking a little bit different this year, but we're still seeing a lot of those innovative and pretty unique products that we're used to seeing year after year. Joining me now is Jim with CES. And Jim, you got a pretty cool setup here, huh?
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Jim3:23
Well, good morning, Alyssa, and we certainly do. So first I want to show you the On2Cook. This is an incredible cooking device that allows you to cook 70 percent faster and 40 percent more sustainably. What we have on top here is a microwave function and on the bottom we have a stove. What that's going to allow you to do is cook very, very quickly. If you need the convenience—we're talking rice in five minutes, baking a cake in just four minutes in here. So if you're like me, if you need to lose a few pounds before the wedding and maybe that extra time to get to the gym, this is great because it's convenient, you can cook healthy meals, and it's fantastic.
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Alyssa3:58
Listen, no wedding for me, but I know a lot of people are trying to lose some weight as a New Year's resolution. So very cool to have that all-in-one product.
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Narrator4:08
First up, you've heard of air fryers, but what about a microwave stovetop? The On2Cook kitchen appliance combines a convection stovetop with an overhead microwave module to cook your meals in record time. An array of temperature sensors inside the On2Cook makes timers a thing of the past and results in perfectly cooked food every single time. The On2Cook is fully funded and ready for production. It's expected to be released in August of 2022 with a price around $500. The On2Cook will likely be partnered with a home meal service like Blue Apron, so you can get your fresh ingredients delivered to the door, throw them in the pot, and enjoy a fresh cooked meal 10 minutes later.
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Alyssa4:48
Sign me up! I found the first thing at CES I want to buy.
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Jim4:53
So happy to hear that. You know, it's true because I live by myself and I'm crazy busy, like you. There's very little time to come home and cook. Now, I don't necessarily buy into buying the subscription stuff because I think half of it would get thrown away—I wouldn't need it in time. But this may change. Well, if I could have that at the office...
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Sanandan Sudhir5:17
Oh, yes, yes.
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Jim5:20
You know, if I'm working late, pop it in the office, it's right there, it's all self-contained—boom, I'm done, I'm not making a big mess. So that's where I think I'd probably have two—one for the office and one at the house.
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Alyssa5:34
Brilliant. Yeah, very, very brilliant. Sandy, congratulations!
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Jim5:36
Congratulations! Thanks for this. This is the coolest product that's come across this desk at this show.
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Sanandan Sudhir5:46
Thank you very much, man. Thanks a lot.
Hello, good morning to all of you. Thank you very much, Prashanth, for inviting me here. Whatever you just saw is what happened the last two months. Looks like a short time frame, but it took us 10 years to reach here. In 2010, when I first filed for the patent for this particular product, the first patent, I had gone to IIM Ahmedabad asking for incubation. Our ecosystem at that time in India was perfect for apps. So the best suggestion that I got was, 'App banao, khaane wala app banao.' I realized that perhaps that's not the way I would be able to move forward if I have to take this invention forward. So I started a services company called Invent India. We filed 60 patents in the last 10 years. Till date, we have about 22 patents granted globally, and we are still innovating. Our mission is 300 patents by 2028, and we should be meeting that.
So I'm just going to give you three or four thoughts in relation to my journey till date—how I have built an innovation-based community in our company, and that's what I expect from all of you in the long run. The first thing is that the most obvious ideas that you come across on a daily basis—of course, all of you get ideas, everybody's inventive, everybody's innovative, right? But the most obvious ideas that just come to you when you get up in the morning are the most obvious ideas. What does this mean? It means that 90 percent of the thoughts that come to your mind are—you can't visualize anything that you have not seen or heard before. So it's a mix and match of what you've already seen. Your first few—5, 10, 15 ideas—are as common as anybody's ideas. When do you get something that is far beyond what is obvious? This is what I tell all my students: death by concepts. Which means you conceptualize, you come up with ideas and more ideas and more ideas, and the stage comes when you go, 'Oh, I don't have any more, I'm done. Everything that I could think of is right here on the paper.' And then the next morning when you get up, you get another brilliant idea—'Oh, I didn't think about this!' And that's when you come up with such ideas where you eventually look at and say, 'Oh wow, I never thought about this.'
It's a very simple thing. The product that you saw—a conventional oven, the microwave oven, which has conduction, convection, radiation, all kinds of energy—it's been there for 50 years. A box, you put your stuff in, you have your heater coil, you have your microwaves. It works, but it doesn't work for you because you make curries, you make stuff where you have to make the masala, you have to add water, and then you need to cook your food. For maybe a European or American, you just put everything in the tray, put it in the oven, it's all done—40 minutes, perfect. So that's the gap. Identifying those gaps and coming up with those ideas takes time. And once you have the idea, once you have some idea of what you intend to do, it takes a lot more time to reach somewhere where it makes sense. The first one was 7 kilograms, lid, and then it went on and on and on, and we had a lot of trouble coming up to this stage.
Second thought: we all get ideas, and as I said, we hear, we listen, we see things, and then we get more ideas. Those ideas are run-of-the-mill ideas because we are late. What do I mean by late? Look at that—if you just search for a computer and a mouse, a patent search, these are the number of patents filed from 1997 onwards up to 2021 which have something to do with a computer and a mouse. What do you see? You see that it peaked out in about 2012-2013 time frame, and that was the time when you had all kinds of mice on the planet—trackball mouse, optical mouse, ergonomic mouse, complex mouse, and a simple mouse. And then eventually all of them went down, and you are left with your nice, ergonomic, simple 50-rupee mouse. That's the time when you're commoditizing it, that's the time when you're value engineering and you're trying to bring down the cost to, let's say, 15 rupees, 20 rupees, so that you can sell a mouse for 50 rupees.
So when do you actually get into a particular product category, whatever your idea is? Look at it on this scale. If you're here, 2001, 2012, 3, 4—any mouse that you come up with, any innovative idea, even if it's hanging on the wall, it will have a market. Somebody will buy it, somebody will try it, and then the future will decide whether it makes sense or not. But most of our ideas that we think, they are there, right at the end. So what's the key thought? Catch them young. Don't wait for it to establish its market. Get into it when there's a lot of scope for innovation.
Most important thing: develop an overview. Everything has to be measurable. If you can't measure it, you cannot improve it, whether it is incremental or blue sky. What do I mean? In everything that you're thinking, there are two things: what is to be done and how to do it. Of course, the third thing is cost and time that it's going to take. But outcome and process are the key. The most obvious thoughts are stuck at 'I know what's to be done, I know how to do it, I'll put six months in it, I'll come up with a nice app.' And then there are silly other people who are doing the same thing to compete with you. When you move to a level where you know what is to be done but there's a question mark of how to do it, you have a certain level of complexity. It's going to take more time, but the outcome also is going to be different—you're going to come up with something that's a little bit more innovative than just the A category. And then you have: you don't know what is to be done, and you don't know how to do it. That's where invention lies.
So it's a choice that you make in your journey. Do you want to start there? Do you want to start somewhere in the middle? Definitely not in the beginning, because then that's run-of-the-mill. It's very difficult to get a patent for something that's there at stage A, and you're sure to get a patent there. But then you're not designing something for somebody on the moon. So be careful that you're aware, as a measurable, what you're doing, what's the market, what's the application, and so on.
This is something that's going to be a discussion later as well—global versus local. Everything that you know, and everything that you think can come up with as an inventive or innovative idea, is out of that space of your knowledge. Increasing that knowledge, going beyond what you already know, is the key to coming up with more innovative ideas. What you know is what Americans have made, let's say, in a CT or an MRI system. What you think is that it's applicable to the Indian context the same way. But there, a nurse costs about ten thousand dollars a month. In India, a nurse costs about ten thousand rupees, or maybe twenty thousand rupees a month. Is it the same? No. So global versus local is a big debate. The product that I showed you earlier is a local way of looking at the global technology.
So get this: we are not the same as the West. Body temperature, 37 degrees—every person who experiences body temperature below 37 and above 37 in their ambience is brought up differently. The ecosystem is different, the culture is different, the religions are different, the philosophy is different. Let's have products also that are different for these two different communities or groups of people.
So to end my note, here is what Einstein said: 'Thinking that has brought us this far has created some problems that this thinking cannot solve.' So to get something you don't have, you have to do something you've never done. It's okay that you've not invented anything till date. You have to understand, gain knowledge, and expand your purview beyond what you know to be able to create something that you have never created. All the best, thank you.