Himanshu, a management graduate from one of the leading schools in India, was employed with a consultancy firm in New York. He was happy with his work as he used to be presented with new challenges in his professional life and was able to take all those in stride.
One evening, he received a letter from a lawyer in India. To his utter surprise, it mentioned that one of his uncles, who used to live in Anarabad in India, had in his will bequeathed all his property?about 1,000 acres of pomegranate orchards?to Himanshu. Anarabad is a small town situated on NH-8. The palace has always been famous for its pomegranates and had recently been registered with the Geographical Indication in India.
Himanshu reached Anarabad and his uncle?s estate manager came with dozens of baskets full of pomegranates and asked him what to do with them. He didn?t have a clue and requested the manager to do what he has been doing for years. The manager informed him that he would sell the pomegranates in the local wholesale market. The next morning the manager came back with a couple of thousand rupees and told Himanshu that this was what he got for all the pomegranates. Himanshu was shocked. Still thinking in dollar terms, he thought it was too little. He gave it a thought and concluded that he had to add value to the pomegranates. After discussing it with some locals he came to the conclusion that pomegranate juice was the best option and he decided to extract pomegranate juice and sell it in the market. The manager got hold of some local people and after working for a day only a few litres of juice was ready. Himanshu thought that this was a classic example of ?much cry, little wool?.
He though more about it and called his friend Rohan, who was working as a researcher and had been granted a number of patents for his inventions. Rohan assured him that he would work on a pomegranate peeling machine and email him the design. After working on it, Rohan and Himanshu were able to make a pomegranate peeling machine that could peel two pomegranates a minute. This was too good. Both of them worked on the design further and added a juicer to the peeling machine. Now these machines could peel and extract juice from two pomegranates in a minute, which means more than a hundred pomegranates in an hour.
Himanshu kept this machine a closely guarded secret and worked on it himself and produced a lot of pomegranate juice which was now being sold in the local market. As his orchards were next to NH-8 and there was a bus stop, he set up a kiosk to sell pomegranate juice there. His business picked up and flourished day by day. He was very happy that he was able to apply his technical and management education to a real life situation. He was getting fantastic return on investment.
Excerpts from ?Business and Intellectual Property?, a book on protecting your ideas by Anurag K Agarwal, chairperson of PGP-PMP at IIMA