Kriya Kaleidoscope

Go Ahead! Make a fool of yourselves
By Sowmya Mahadevan

An excerpt - 

On one of my evening walks, I deviated from my usual route and chanced upon a roller skating rink in the neighbourhood. The rink was bustling with activity, as young teenagers were practising various routines and perfecting their art. For the full article, read on>>

Kriya Product Survey

This month, we conducted a Product Survey amongst production editors and copy editors who use Kriya with an aim to understand the user experience. The survey results were very valuable and insightful and have helped us paint a clear path for how we should proceed in the coming year. The survey was sent out to production editors and copyeditors and we received a total of 39 responses.  We present the survey results here.

Keys to Innovation - STM Conference
By Ravi Venkataramani

I had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion about the Keys to Innovation at the STM Frankfurt conference. It was quite interesting to hear the viewpoints of the various publishers and tech companies on the panel and I thought it might be useful to share my learnings with the Kriya community. The objective of the discussion was as follows:

Innovation is at the heart of our industry as new business models and (digital) technologies gain traction like never before, to the point of disrupting century-old foundations of scholarly publishing. The panel discussed how organizations of various purposes and sizes address these topics by managing commercial, technological and cultural change.

The panel was represented by the following people
Sam Herbert, Co-founder, 67 Bricks
Steven Inchcoombe, Chief Publishing Officer, Springer Nature
Jayne Marks, Vice President of Global Publishing, Wolters Kluwer Health Research, Learning & Practice
Pierre Montagano, Director of Business Development, Code Ocean
Moderated by: Daniel Ebneter, CEO, Karger Publishers

Here are some key insights shared by the members:
Springer Nature - They use the Objectives, Goals, Strategies, and Measures (OGSM) dashboard to facilitate their strategic planning. They have identified 4 different innovation areas
Adaptive - evolve current offering under the current model.
Disruptive - evolve current offering and reinvent the model.
Radical - reinvent offering with new capabilities under the current model.
Architectural - new offering with a new model.

Code Ocean - Change is hard in publishing especially large organisations. Startups are born in the cloud and can innovate more easily. Big publishing companies are focused on B2B and making money. Start-ups are focused on end-user and changing user behavior. 

67 Bricks - The question that gets asked often is why now? It is important to work with your customers and engage with them in building solutions. Get in the race and try to catch up with your competitors who have already lapped you a few times. It is never too late!

Wolters Kluwer - Train your staff on how to engage your customers to understand how to improve your products. Training is important to encourage your staff to think differently.
Springer Nature - Engage with younger dynamic organizations externally to drive innovation within.
Wolters Kluwer - The traditional world has disparate teams. Editorial/publishing, production, and sales/marketing. The digital future is not just being digital. It is

• UX/UI

• Product management

• Product owners

• Technology

• Digital marketing

• Customer engagement

There is a need for lean product development, agile technology and to choose either incremental innovation or disruptive innovation. Pivot individual roles and bring the change in. It is harder to bring in agile in a traditional publishing organisation. Reward the experimentation, the risk-taking in your people. Innovation tournaments to allow people across disparate areas to ideate and drive the new ideas within your organization. How do you set up your organization, product-focused or customer-focused? Small self-directed teams are a great idea. Bring in people from outside who can be change agents. 

Karger Publishing - Cultural change is necessary to bring in an innovation mindset.
Code Ocean - Publishing is not easy. You need to understand the ecosystem to build relevant solutions. Publishing has a lot of complexity that needs to be understood properly.
67 Bricks - Need to innovate at the intersection of user needs, business insights, and technology. Improve the user experience. 

A lot of great insights for sure. What are the keys to innovation for you? Where do you want to take your business? Start the discussion internally, bring in an external agent to bring in perspective. Take small steps at first, learn from the experience. Be bold, learn quickly, involve everyone. A perfect recipe to transform your organisation. 

Exeter, iMorph empower students with Hour of Code activities

We are excited to unveil the launch of Exeter Academy that supports the outreach learning efforts by Exeter Premedia Services. We kicked off the first session of the academy by supporting the Hour of Code Week 2019 that aims to create an opportunity for every student to learn computer science. 

Mr. Dorai Thodla of iMorph and Mr. Ravi Venkataramani of Exeter Premedia took the opportunity of conducting an hour-long workshop for students who had zero knowledge in programming. The kids were filled with enthusiasm and loved the Hour of Code experience.

“It was an exhilarating experience. We were trying to convey to the 7th and 8th graders that coding can be fun and help improve their thinking skills. We saw evidence of that in every school we participated in.  All these kids are self-learners and are driven by the joy of solving problems. That was really nice to see. We thank Exeter Academy for organizing these visits and being there with us in all the schools,” said Mr. Dorai Thoda in a statement.

The Hour of Code initiative is a global movement by Computer Science Education Week and Code.org who have managed to reach millions of students through a one-hour introduction to computer science and computer programming.

“The children were full of energy andbubbling with ideas. I could clearly sense the feeling of achievement in each of these kids as they completed the various challenges. The Hour of Code is indeed a brilliant initiative that shows kids how much fun computer science can be as well as boost their confidence in their own abilities,” said Ravi Venkataramani, CEO of Exeter Premedia. “Mr. Thodla and other volunteers did a fantastic job in making this happen and we look forward to working with iMorph on all our school outreach activities in the coming months.”