My colleague Vimali Swamy (Correspondent at siliconindia & the SmartTechie) and I are here at Startup Saturday.

The opening talk was by Dr. Vishy Poosala, Head of Bell Labs India.

Dr. Vishy spoke on Managing new products and innovation.

Some of the topics Dr. Vishy touched upon included applying innovation to new products and generating product roadmaps, involving customers in evolving go-to-market strategies; managing innovation within organisations; securing innovation.

He cautioned the audience not to go the Xerox way wherein you make a lot of innovations without making money! Don't get consumed into your self. You need to know what's happening the world out there. Learn to kill ideas that don't matter to your bottom line—it could be your own idea or that of your team. Innovations should be put into plan. Have success metric and right controls as well.

How do you get customers involved?

Involve your customer from Day Zero i.e., right from the concept stage.

Launch a prototype as early as possible so some users can touch it and you will be able to gauge if it works or not.

He highlighted some of the brutal truths of product roadmapping. Certain features are a must.  Classify all features and put them in to buckets as to which are critical and which are add-ons. Mark every feature into A, B & C. Only do A. It always takes more time to do anything than you think. You should have good distribution in terms of feature releases.

-Pradeep Shankar