Plenary 7: Kumar Sachidanand
Managed Innovation: the Cognizant Success Story
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Kumar Sachidanand Sr Director |
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Profile
Kumar is responsible for Strategy, Change Management and Evangelization of Managed Innovation thereby creating a Culture of Innovation within Cognizant’s 160,000 associates enabling them to deliver business value to customers. With a Masters Business Administration and MS in Software Engineering, Bachelors’ in Instrumentation Engineering and a Diploma in Electronics and Communication Engineering, he is a technologist by heart, but his passion for business creativity drew him to his current role of being an Innovation Catalyst at Cognizant.
Designing and facilitating strategic innovation workshops, mentoring Innovation champions, conducting innovation capability programs, organizing large innovation events like fail camps, hackathons, innovation jams, innovation awards, innovation fairs, innovation summits and researching innovation tools & techniques are part of his day-to-day work at Cognizant. Creativity, Play as a tool for idea generation, Storytelling, Entrepreneurship, Lean Startup and Design Thinking are some areas he specializes in.
His thoughts on innovation and creativity are echoed on his twitter account @kumarsachi
Microsoft, Satyam, Eurotherm (part of Invensys) and Annamalai University are few other notable organizations he worked in his long list of 13 past employers in past 25 years. As an Architect Advisor for Developer Platform Evangelism (DPE) Group at Microsoft, he was the Technology Development Manger driving technology readiness initiatives and Solutions for Go-To-Market for Microsoft’s System Integrator partners in India. A multi-disciplinarian, a techie and a gadget freak. Loves experimenting with Microsoft SDKs and skunk work code. Electronics, microprocessors, component level repairs, control instrumentation, assembly level programming, C++, MFC, COM+, database, business intelligence, portals, e-commerce are some of the areas he has worked on.
