by diana | Jan 28, 2012 | Blog, Field Notes, Jan '12 India Trip, Thoughts and Ideas
Something we’ve learned out here in Pollachi is that warrantees are absolutely necessary. Every customer asks, “Does this come with a warranty?” or “Where can we fix this?” For Essmart, we need to think about having a service center for all of these technologies in...
by diana | Jan 28, 2012 | Blog, Field Notes, Jan '12 India Trip
This was an exciting day for Essmart. The inventory experiment begins (although on a very limited scale)! In the morning, we met with our students to demonstrate the different products. Afterward, they gathered more products from Prashanth’s car and went off, two by...
by diana | Jan 28, 2012 | Blog, Field Notes, Jan '12 India Trip
Prashanth had contacted one of the local university’s placement offices to secure four Master’s students for our surveying. We met them at 9 am, after Prashanth and I finished off our south Indian breakfasts. In Tamil, Prashanth explained Essmart and the purpose of...
by diana | Jan 28, 2012 | Blog, Field Notes, Jan '12 India Trip
My train arrived around 7:30 am. Prashanth picked me up around 8:30 am, and we headed straight from the train station to Pollachi. The total trip took about 13 hours. Ridiculous, I know, but we stopped for food along the way and got some printing done. Prashanth did...
by diana | Jan 26, 2012 | Blog, Field Notes, Jan '12 India Trip, Thoughts and Ideas
I hopped in my cab at 8:30 am and headed toward meetings at Envirofit, the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, CogKnit, and Koshy’s. But unfortunately (or fortunately, as things tend to always work out), my cab driver and I miscommunicated, and he aimed toward a...
by diana | Jan 25, 2012 | Blog, Field Notes, Jan '12 India Trip, Thoughts and Ideas
Development Dialogue Day 3 kicked off with a special speech by Harish Hande, founder of SELCO. SELCO is well known among India’s social sector, and I use SELCO as a true example of creating partnerships across sectors to build ecosystems that enable all of these other...
