Health, safety, AI: test your business creativity with Edition 243 of our weekly quiz!
This insightful feature from YourStory tests and strengthens your business acumen! Here are 5 questions to kick off this 243rd quiz. Ready?
Lateral Sparks, the weekly quiz from YourStory, tests your domain knowledge, business acumen, and lateral thinking skills (see the previous edition here). In this 243rd edition of the quiz, we present issues tackled by real-life entrepreneurs in their startup journeys.
What would you do if you were in their shoes? At the end of the quiz, you will find out what the entrepreneurs and innovators themselves actually did. Would you do things differently?
Check out YourStory’s Book Review section as well, with takeaways from over 355 titles on creativity and entrepreneurship, and our weekend PhotoSparks section on creativity in the arts.
Q1: Medical prescriptions
Patients who need medicines often need to visit multiple pharmacies to complete a prescription, since not each small store may have all the needed products. What’s a more efficient solution here?
Q2: Inspection of interiors
Inspecting the inside of a ship's hull, fuel tank, or nuclear reactor is a dangerous job. How can safety be improved here, along with asset productivity?
Q3: Holiday planning
Planning a holiday often involves static PDFs, endless follow-ups, and mark-ups that seem to appear only later. How can these pain points be resolved?
Q4: Waste management
Many countries generate million tonnes of waste every year, and much of it is dumped or burned. What’s a more sustainable and yet financially viable approach here?
Q5: Safe and sustainable livelihoods
Many women labourers in the tobacco sector such as bidi rolling report chronic respiratory conditions, eye damage, and even cancer. What better alternatives can be designed in this regard?
Answers!
Congratulations on having come this far! But there’s more to come – answers to these five questions (below), as well as links to articles with more details on the entrepreneurs’ solutions. Happy reading, happy learning – and happy creating!
A1: Medical prescriptions
Founded by Aman Priyadarshi, Plazza tries to ensure that medicines prescribed by doctors are actually available when patients need them. Its AI-based inventory planning predicts local demand and recommends which medicines each store should stock.
AI helps continuously analyse prescribing patterns at the neighbourhood level, allowing every store to maintain a tailored inventory. Read more here about its model, and its Series A funding round co-led by Accel, Elevation Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners.
A2: Inspection of interiors
Founded by Vishrant Dave, Prateesh Awasthi and Ayush Ranjan, Armatrix is a deeptech startup with robots that have snake-like arms. They are flexible enough to thread through tight, twisting spaces that a rigid industrial robot cannot reach.
AI helps with real-time path planning and digital-twin simulation, so the arm can adapt as it moves through unpredictable industrial layouts. Read more here about the robotic maintenance market for shipyards, refineries and defense areas, and the startup’s seed round of founding.
A3: Holiday planning
Founded by Kshitij Chaudhary, 30 Sundays aims to make travel services honest and effortless, via customised trips and transparent information. It has embedded AI across sales, lead qualification, itinerary creation, follow-ups, and reservations
It also keeps the human in the loop to customise and support the traveller’s journey. Read more here about this holiday planning and booking platform, and its Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
A4: Waste management
Nearly 40% of waste in a city like Bengaluru originates from tech parks and bulk generators, according to Wilma Rodrigues, Chief Transformation Officer at Saahas Zero Waste. It operates a zero-waste program for such bulk generators.
It also has an extended producer responsibility vertical covering plastic and electronic waste, and a closed loop retail arm that sells recovered products back to communities. Read more here about how the company diverted 40,000 tonnes last year across recycling, composting, biogas, and reuse channels, claiming a 96% landfill diversion rate.
A5: Safe and sustainable livelihoods
Founded by Karunya Gunavathy, Kottravai helps women labourers transition from bidi rolling to sustainable livelihoods. It trains and employs women to make coconut-shell, banana-fibre, terracotta, and food products.
It has also partnered with Crazy Coconut, a sustainable, eco-friendly brand, to train the women for three months. Read more here about its four production clusters, emerging units for aromatic candles and wellness products, and plans for corporate gifting.
YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators.