Week that Was – April 30th
Project Management
The Program Management Office (PMO) and Feedback Foundation at Bhubaneswar and Cuttack have been meeting the government to get locations finalized. Site selection has been a particularly challenging and iterative activity given the multiple concerns that need balancing: equity, architectural constraints, RCT design.
Siva is enjoying a well deserved break from work in a week-long meditation workshop using the Vipassana method.
Communications
This week, the communications team assisted on the full-court press of spreading the word on our Open Innovation Challenge. We tweeted, facebooked, emailed, googled, and many more internet propagation service (ed) it all over the internet in hopes of putting it in the right creative hands. The resulting interest was so overwhelming that we’ve extended the deadline to May 20th.
It was also decided that the team isn’t looking dapper enough these days (as I sit here typing this in my black Nike mesh shorts and flip-flops, I’m still not sure what they were getting at). To remedy this, we were tasked with creating custom polo shirts, complete with Sammaan branding. Next week I will be meeting with tailors and visiting fabric stores to realize my dream team shirts.
The communications team took to the mountains over the weekend, hiking from Dehra Dun to Mussoorie, soaking up the fresh Himalayan air and basking in the absence of car horns along the way.
Research & Design
The open innovation contest was conceptualized and seeded appropriately. We’re targeting leading design & architecture schools, as well as professionals globally. We’ll soon be running a campaign on Facebook to extend the contest’s reach even more.
The innovation challenges within the contest have been carefully chosen as being the most likely beneficiaries of crowdsourced divergent thinking. It’s an experiment for us and we’re quite keen on seeing the quality and nature of ideas that are submitted.
The design of the appropriate business model for these toilets will kick off soon. A team from the Yale School Of Management, working with Professor Mobarak alongside Quicksand, will design the business and the operating models. There will be a fair degree of interplay between the business model and the overall design of the facility and the communication strategy used to market it and we’re excited at exploring some creative pricing schemes, discount mechanisms, membership mechanisms that we’ve been thinking about.