Turning Problems into Opportunities

by Team xMonks

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Nature has always blessed us. The gift of hearing is one of those precious gifts. xMonks Drive welcomes Nitin Sisodia, the man who made newborns avail this gift of hearing. Nitin founded Sohum Innovations Lab. Sohum Innovation lab is an innovation company with focus on healthcare and services. His vision is to create scale in healthcare product and service solutions for the global healthcare market.

Let’s hear the story of Sohum.

Table of Contents

Story of Sohum

The most curious question was why did Nitin choose the name Sohum. And here is the story that goes.

“I would love to share that story with you. Sohum, basically is taken from Vedic philosophy. As many people know it as a sound. If you go and dig deeper into the literature, you will find out a story which talks that when a baby’s born, it cries. And it says Gohum, Gohum! Which means Who am I? Who am I in this world? And the universe replies back as Sohum, which means you and I are the same, so don’t worry.”

“It relates well with our motto. The thing that we are doing for newborn hearing screening, and that is the first word that the baby hears. We thought we also should be connecting to that.”

As one starts on a new journey it’s important to be strong and driven. What were Nitin’s strengths as an Entrepreneur?

Strengths As An Entrepreneur

Nitin considers his understanding of humans as his pillar in his entrepreneurial journey.

“I have some basic understanding of human relationships which keeps me connected to people. Whether it is my stakeholders, whether they are my customers, whether they are my colleagues, patients, anyone.

I understand why this person is here. And what is in it for them, and I should provide that thing for them. I do everything possible to figure that out. I think it is a journey, and it’s where you have to take help from many people, you have to involve them, you have to actually make a very clear value proposition for them. And that is what I do most of the time.”

Every strong person should know how to handle situations which are problematic too. While there are many perspectives, Nitin’s the most unique.

Start-ups and Risk Management

“I would love to just talk about one principle that, you know, one of my mentors always tells me that it’s not about taking risks.

Startup or entrepreneurship is not about taking risks, it is actually about mitigating risk.

So how would you really look at the whole situation and figure out that “Okay, there are so many people around the mango tree, I don’t want to pick another mango tree. I will actually go to some other tree and we’ll pick something else. It’s finding an easier route to solve your own problems. It’s basically value generation. It’s basically giving more jobs. It’s basically about solving local needs, making it global, making unscalable things. So that passion should be there.

Working Towards a Cause

We know how novel Nitin’s initiative is to bring a change in healthcare, also making it more affordable and accessible for people in need.

His source of inspiration is that he wants everyone to have the gift of language.

Here is what he has to say about–

“In India itself, close to 130,000 babies are born every year with hearing loss and remain undetected. They eventually lose their speech and development for lifetime because we are not doing intervention with the right type of technologies. So when I realised that this is really a lacuna in the system. This shortcoming can be filled with appropriate technology.

Then I started looking at options like why are we not using technology which are available in the West? Why are we not actually providing it? Is it expensive? Is it not working? Do we not have healthcare providers? These are the problems that definitely require expensive prohibitive disposables. Expensive infrastructure. Expensive Healthcare Professionals. Then I realised that we really need to solve this problem from scratch?”

The world is blessed to have someone with a heart like Nitin. Hope every child is helped and treated.

About The Speaker: Nitin Sisodia

Nitin Sisodia Founder & CEO of Sohum Innovation Labs. He is also a 2010 Stanford India Biodesign fellow. Nitin is named ‘Top 20 innovators under 35’ 2013 by MIT tech review. He is passionate about ideas at the intersection of technology and user-centered design to serve unmet clinical needs. He has designed several innovative products with national and international companies in India, Germany and Japan. He has a graduate degree in electrical engineering from National Institute of Technology, Bhopal and a masters in design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.

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