If you want to understand true scarcity, try finding a specialized resistor on the GIKI campus on a Friday night,” Junaid Shaheen quips. He insists that the resource limitations he faced during his four years at the institute were the most effective training for his current role, which involves leading teams that optimize operations with razor-thin budgets. “You couldn’t just throw money at a problem. You had to invent a workaround, or you failed.
He vividly remembers the intense competition for lab equipment, the late-night hunts for tools, and the ingenious solutions born from necessity. That pressure cooker environment taught him that innovation is less about having unlimited resources and more about maximizing the potential of what little you have. Today, he’s a prominent figure in the global tech landscape, known for his ability to scale businesses efficiently. The core of his strategy remains the same: “Every constraint is a challenge, and every challenge is a design problem. GIKI taught me how to design solutions that are elegant, robust, and, above all, cheap.” He concludes that the scarcity of the Topi hills ultimately bred an abundance of ingenuity.