[member profile] Sunil Malhotra
Sunil Malhotra - change-the-world entrepreneur, multi-cultural expert and industrial designer focusing sustainability through design and innovation
Sunil Malhotra is the Founder & CEO of Ideafarms – a smartsourcing enterprise that helps globalised corporations to achieve value through innovation. His diverse experience in consulting, manufacturing and IT confirms his belief that for leveraging the true value of innovation we have to embrace multiple disciplines.
A breakthrough thinker in innovation and a prolific writer, he has professional degrees in Industrial Engineering and Law. He completed the Graduate Program in Industrial Design at IIT Bombay and thereafter ran a successful consultancy in New Delhi, India, that morphed into Ideafarms in 2002.
Author of the term ‘Heart Capital’, which he coined over a decade ago, he believes that focusing on the individual is what will shape the future of work. At the core of his business philosophy is the simple understanding that ‘everything produced by human beings is meant for use by other human beings’.
Innovation is his current agenda. “Tools and methods of innovation will provide little value if people cannot understand how to use them in their own contexts”, he says, “and this is a cultural issue. The business of culture will be the future of business.”
Sunil is a lateral thinker and a fan of Ed de Bono’s creativity methods. A highly creative individual himself, he takes upon himself the responsibility of creating work environments that give people a chance to explore their own potential. He makes time to coach and mentor people, both within his own company and outside. He calls himself a change-the-world entrepreneur but is quite content in knowing that he can make a difference to individuals, one at a time.
His quiet ambition camouflages his keen passion for a variety of subjects that interest him, providing a visionary dimension to his thinking. He is a staunch humanist with a critical streak. He criticises education paradigms all over the world and believes that this area needs activist interventions. He also believes that designers have the highest responsibility towards sustainability.
He would like to see a new world where business is a means to the end of societal improvement and not an end to itself as it has come to be today. He has unflinching belief in the globalised world. “We cannot underestimate the power of the Internet as a force that will eventually equalise our worlds”, he says. His unabashed posturing on India’s role in defining the future is something you will love to hate.
