My “summer” internship at Panasonic India was ironically a wintry experience within an air-conditioned chamber that of a size of a telephone booth! Hailing from a hilly region of Uttarakhand, it gave me a homely feeling in some peculiar manner. For me, Panasonic was an unprecedented bliss. Perhaps the best part of my junior year in MBA.
Panasonic India Pvt. Ltd. is a subsidiary of global Panasonic Corporation. The South Asian headquarter of the company is located in Gurgaon which was my workplace for the two months of Summer Internship. I worked in the Mobility Department with its Solutions and Strategy Consulting Team.
One very interesting thing about this internship was that I and my friend from IMI were only and first ever interns with the firm. This brought with it a pack of unprecedented advantages. We two were assigned a plush small seminar room (the telephone booth sized one) which was going to be our cabin for the next two month. In a Japanese culture of group solidarity, employees of almost all ranks sat in open cubicles that facilitate frankness and open communication within and among the teams. Apparently, our mentor had to “walk” to our cabin from his “cubicle” to discuss the day’s work.
I joined the department at a very crucial juncture. Panasonic smartphones were undergoing a paradigm shift in their value proposition. The company had recently launched its artificial intelligence buddy- ARBO. The project assigned to us me was to formulate mobility solutions based on extensive research and competition benchmarking. The strategic solutions that I was expected to come up with, if found pragmatic, would transcend into reality in the next phase launch of Mobile handsets and ARBO.
Starting with extensive secondary research in the first week, I gathered information about the recent advances in the field of AI and IOT. Alongside, I started to enlist the ideas that I thought were innovative and practical enough to be integrated with Panasonic smartphones. I studied the User Interfaces of recently launched smartphones and tried to study the current trend and progressions. The primary aim was to find out the features and services most desired by the customers. For capturing customer perception, I also went about performing a customer survey and an on-field vendor survey. The vendor survey required me to tread all across the widespread lanes of Delhi. Covering all major parts of Delhi NCR boiling at around 50 degree Celsius under the burning sun was a hard nut to crack. But the objective of the project and the desire to learn kept me motivated.
After having studied the market thoroughly through primary and secondary sources, I was able to figure out what exactly customer wants. Thence, I prepared detailed structure of how each idea proposed by us would actually satisfy customer need or want.
Panasonic is the first company in my career that I worked with. With an amazing guidance from our mentor, I transformed from being idiosyncratic to a professional. I wanted to leave a mark on them by putting forth some exceptional strategies that would actually get implemented in the upcoming version of Panasonic smartphones. They wanted to leverage my naive and customer-like approach towards their product. It was rather a symbiotic relationship. I felt empowered. I knew the end results of my internship would matter to them. As a point of fact, they mattered a big deal.
As I gave my final presentation, and the personals from different heads of mobility team were all ears, they were noting down some of my ideas they found worth implementing. I felt accomplished. The feeling of having created an impact still lingers on...