On the second day of the Inotex 2024 exhibition, a panel entitled “When innovation becomes promising” was held on the Inotex stage. “Hamid Mohammadi” the founder of Digikala, “Mohammad Khalaj” the CEO of Snapp, “Alireza Kianpour” the CEO of Golrang System, Arsham Sharafai the CEO of Metatech Snowa and Reza Ghiabi were present in this panel as panel moderators.
According to Iran digital economy annotation, according to the Inotex 2024 news headquarters, at the beginning of this panel, “Mohammad Khalaj”, the CEO of Snapp, said about where he started this innovation series: “Innovation in companies is very dependent on hope. When we talk about innovation, it means discovering and developing that discovery. If it is checked, all collections have not been successful in these two areas, and if a collection has achieved success, it has combined these two items. “Snapp was also formed based on an idea and need, especially in the field of transportation, and this idea is an Iranian product that was developed with the same hope as mentioned.”
He continued by emphasizing that failure is necessary for success: “It is natural that we have had successes along this path and sometimes there have been failures as well. All our colleagues at Snapp have tried to go the untraveled way. Regarding the failures, sometimes there were activities that were not justified in terms of the business model and faced failure, but there were also ideas that led to success.”
Hamid Mohammadi, the founder of Digikala, said about where the innovation of this collection started and where it has reached today: “in innovation, regardless of the characteristics of technology, the criterion is to see the potential of that activity to what extent it has an impact and improvement and whether it can Maximize costs and require the least amount of time. If we look at the phenomenon of innovation with this definition, we can say that many businesses and other phenomena are innovative; Because they have caused change and empowerment of people and audience. With this definition, most of the time, businesses in the field of digital economy have been leaders in innovation, but it can also be seen in traditional industries that some of them have caused positive changes that we can refer to as innovative businesses.
Mohammadi defines innovation as the effect it leaves on society and continues: “Digikala is an innovative group in e-commerce and was able to make access to many goods possible in small towns that were not possible. In the past, it was not possible to know what customers say about a product, but now it is possible. All these things, among other things, have created a change in shopping style. To provide these services well, it is necessary to use good technologies.”
Alireza Kianpour, the CEO of Golrang System, said about Golrang’s entry into the path of innovation: “Basically, the space of innovation has its quirks and everyone is looking for big events.” We are looking for improvements. However, in the market, everyone is looking for the events that caused a stir. At Golrang, we believe in slowness and consistency. “In general, there has been innovation in Golrang for years.”
Arsham Sharfai, Managing Director of Metatech Snowa Company, said about the infrastructure of industrial groups and their potentials: “In the new generation of technology, we must act differently. Industry groups should engage with startups. We are looking for such interactions in Entekhab. To date, Entekhab has invested in 14 to 15 startups. In general, industry groups have attractive infrastructure and can be a springboard for startups. Snowa’s plan is to increase the number of its investments in startups to 27 to 28 this year. It is planned to invest almost 20 million dollors in a startup this year.”
Hamid Mohammadi, the co-founder of Digikala, expressed concern about the state of the country’s digital economy and said: “Although we are always told that you are optimistic in this ecosystem, I want to give a warning. Startups and the digital economy are one of the country’s few opportunities to get out of the crisis, but the reality is that with the events of the last few years, this window is almost closing.” He also said: “The window of opportunity was opened from 2011 to 2021, but we did not use it well, and sometimes we even give a ax of it. “Now it’s just slightly open window.” At the end, Mohammadi said: “I hope that reason will return to the heads of those who make this window close with unwise decisions.”
In the continuation of the panel, Mohammad Khalaj said about the failures of the Snapp group: “It is natural that we have had projects in the Snapp group that have faced failure, but along with these failures, there have been valuable achievements. The nature of businesses that are active in this field is to go the untraveled ways. However, the extent of resilience of businesses will be different depending on the size, financial power and capacity of human resources. “In general, a small failure may destroy one business but not cause problems for another.”
He went on to mention some of the projects that failed at Snapp and said: “A few years ago at Snapp, we launched a SnappQ service that was for games. At the same time, a similar program was created in the national media, which continued That service was not justified for us and this program failed. In Snapp, there was another service called Eskano, and it was supposed to operate in the field of buying and selling real estate, but this service did not work and was closed. In the field of transportation, there are some services that are being implemented on a trial basis, which we develop or remove depending on the needs of the users. »
Khalaj further added: “If for any reason a service model stops working, it is considered a failure. Although in the case of the “I’m in a hurry” option, the snapp service was not stopped on our side, which was considered a failure, but the pressure of the regulator to remove this service caused another failure for us. In general, we have had a good learning and recovery from the projects that are stopped.”
In the continuation of this panel, Hamid Mohammadi said, “The most important thing was that the business model was the most compatible with the existing conditions.” In Digikala, there is an innovation center called DigiNext, which has started its mission from the first day by investing in areas that have several features. Among these features is that it has great potentials, on the one hand, they are related to artificial intelligence technology, and the topic they are working on should be related to e-commerce. During this time, many successes have emerged from Diginext.”
In the following, the CEO of Golrang answered the question, how do you see startups and what is their position towards them? He stated: “In general, there have been many failures in all collections. In Golrang, the amount of failures has not been low. In Golrang, there is a need for the help of startups in many issues. He further listed the weakness in interacting with startups as one of the main problems these days and stated: “We don’t know how to talk to startups, and in turn, they can’t interact with industrial groups either.” In the end, Snapp’s CEO stated that the lack of success or failure shows the characteristic of hope in companies.
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