Mrinmoy Chakraborty

Mrinmoy Chakraborty is a serial IoT-preneur and a ‘business artist’ with over 17 years’ experience and a proven track record in building and leading global technology businesses in Korea, India, the US, and the UK. He currently heads Digital Business at SOLiD, Korea and had prior leadership roles at Cypress Semiconductor, Xchanging, and Onmobile and at Boston-based startup, Senaya, as a co-founder.

A constant student, Chakraborty holds a Master’s degree in business management from Stanford Business School as a Sloan Fellow, a post-graduate degree in industrial management from NITIE, Mumbai and a BE (EE) from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He has 10 granted, 11 published US patents and one filed Korean patent in the IoT field. He has two super curious and hyper-active boys, 5 and 12, who he says prepare him to deal with the volatile, uncertain, complex and exciting technology business world, every day.

Chakraborty has been at the company for over three years, but his journey here can be traced back to 2010, when he founded his first IoT startup after graduating from Stanford Business School. His engineering team and co-founding CEO were Korean, and he became fascinated by Korean technology and the Koreans’ exemplary work ethic. “I was excited by the opportunity to combine innovations in Korean hardware and Indian software for the global market," he says.

His startup introduced cellular technology into the pallet industry in the US market for the first time, which paved the way for customers’ digital transformation from a traditional “supply chain company” to a “supply chain information engineering company”. However this technology was ahead of its time. Step forward a few years to 2016, when he met the SOLiD co-founders, Chairman and CEO Dr. Joon Chung and co-CEO Dr. Seung Hee Lee. "These two brilliant visionaries built SOLiD as one of the global leaders in in-building wireless solution space. The following year, they entrusted me to build the IoT business for SOLiD - I saw this as my second chance to create a world class IoT organisation."

His arrival at the organisation is all the more remarkable given that he's the first foreign executive in SOLiD Korea’s 21-year history. "This journey started as an adventure with a lot of unknowns in a foreign land, but it's also been the best one of my career so far," he explains.

Chakraborty explains that managing this digital change must be done with a human-centric approach. “Any new technology introduction is change management,” he says. “It changes people’s lives and even people’s vocabulary. Digital technologies make data transparent, and at times eliminate middlemen, which can be scary for people that are part of the ecosystem.”

For many in the technology industry, the COVID-19 pandemic has fast-tracked digitalisation. Chakraborty is optimistic. “I have a very positive outlook for the post-Coronavirus world, especially for my friends and partners working in technology industries. I believe that digital transformation was never a question of ‘if’, it has always been a question of when. COVID-19 has decided one thing for us - the time is now.”