Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Paolo Juvara, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Lab (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on how we have evolved the program a bit. When we started, the application process involved people presenting their ideas. At that point, we were asking for people to submit ideas. As we went through the evolution over the years, we have completely morphed the program.

In the application stage, we do not ask for ideas anymore. What we ask to see is why you want to learn what is being taught here. You do have some interest in entrepreneurship. Can you actually learn this online? We change the application process from submitting and evaluating ideas to submitting an equivalent of a 

college essay. That speaks to what Paolo just explained to this being primarily a human resource development strategy for Oracle.

A lot of people who apply for the program actually don’t how to come up with a good idea before going through, at least, three months of the curriculum where we teach some of the building blocks of how to come up with a good idea and how to flesh out a good idea. If you want to comment on that, I think it’s a very important aspect of how we’ve evolved the program.

Paolo Juvara: Absolutely. We want to asses the motivation of the person, their ability to learn, and their willingness to be coached. A lot of people come to the program, perhaps, with different expectations. We want to make sure that the expectations are very clear. There are other programs at Oracle where they have an idea and then develop it. It is complementary.

It really is about making sure that people understand what it takes to take a product to market successfully beyond developing a prototype or beyond developing the product technically. It’s the softer skills that are taught at the One Million by One Million program that are more difficult to find or learn. We really wanted to make sure that people have it very clear in their minds that this is what the program is about.

It’s about what you want to learn. It’s about what you want to get out of the program. It’s not an easy program for people to go through. You need to do lots of work. We want make sure that people understand the level of commitment that we expect of them if they decide to participate in the program. This idea of starting from an essay really helped people understand that this was a different program.

We continue to fine-tune the program. Like everything else, it’s never finished. In every iteration, we do small changes and small tweaks. So far, it has been working very well.

Sramana Mitra: A couple of points on what you said that we should probably call it, there are over 500 hours worth of material in the curriculum that people have access to. We want them to, at least, do a good 500 hours worth of core curriculum studying in the first three months that they are in the program.

Then in that process, we want them to come up with an idea. It’s a one-year program that is split up into quarters. In the first quarter that you’re in the program, we want you to go really study the core curriculum and come up with an idea.

In the second three-month period, we want you to flesh out that idea, come up with validations and some level of competitive analysis. By the third quarter, we want you to have a pitch ready and an investor pitch with the assumption that your investor is Oracle in this case. Oracle management will start seeing your project once you have all of these pieces in place.

You need to have some level of validation, some level of positioning, competitive analysis, and TAM assessment. All of this is done in a sophisticated pitch. Notice one very important choice we’ve made in designing this program is, there’s not one line of code writing in this entire process. It is teaching business skills as opposed to coding skills. A vast majority of people doing this program are people who already know how to code.

It’s like a mini-MBA of how to bring a product to market following entrepreneurial principles. That’s the learning that we are offering here.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Paolo Juvara, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Lab
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