Services Innovation- Humanics

Here's an experience:

Airlines A: Ontime takeoff, ontime landing, luggage on time; studded with technology but lacks human touch.

Airline B: Ontime takeoff, ontime landing, luggage on time; great human touch.

As for the metrics, both score well on all parameter. But which one would you choose to fly with. For me and for Samson David from Infosys, the answer is clearly Airline- B.

Impressing upon the point that customer delight is created not just by Mechanics but largely and increasingly by Humanics.

Customer delight is a three step process that involves: Knowing --> Engaging/ Exciting --> Partnering.

By taking examples from firms such as Lego, Apple, Nike, and a few telecom firms, David drove the point home that how vital is to partner with customers as co-creators.

While attempting this, three questions needs to be answered:

• How can I design for my experience?
• Are my internal systems aligned to make it happen?
• Is my top management game for it?

Remember, customer delight can come from serendipity. It needs to come by design and Humanics goes a long way in ensuring it.

Services Innovation- ICICI Bank

India's largest private sector bank and one of the most admired firms globally has a lot to learn from in terms of innovation. Madhabi, Executive Director of ICICI Bank shared in a very interesting presentation ICICI Bank's way of inspiring innovation at the firm.

In Madhabi's view: Innovation = Ideation + Execution to Scale

Execution to scale calls in for a culture that would encourage taking risk and processes to contain these. Of the several challenges to successful innovation is- Not Invented Here syndrome, where people stick to their own ideas and aren't open to look outside for ideas and adoption. Another challenges is fear of failure.

Some of the practices that ICICI follows to encourage innovations are:

• Copy- cat Award: Awards conferred to best copied ideas implemented well. This helps drive away the NIH syndrome


• DNA Award on Innovation: Reinforces innovation to be in the DNA of the organization, that being a separate function limited to a few sets of people.


• Idea Laboratory: Employees contribute ideas and gets points against these. Business Units that garner maximum ideas are awarded periodically.

Madhabi opined that what makes services special is the people dimension in it. With very high dependence on people there needs to be high level of discipline. ICICI leverages technology to bring this discipline around processes. Further the process of processizing itself is cascaded across the organization is a cautious and systematic way in a group of 10 to 12 people at a time.

She believes that one of the prime cause of innovation is- Impossibility of Goal. So it helps when people are given impossible goals and giving sufficient resources to strive the achievements.

Instances such as ICICI Direct, Shifting customer from branch banking; increase usage of mobile banking; and introducing banking as a part of curriculum in educational institutes went as some of the best examples of systematic innovation in services leads by ICICI Bank.

Innovation in Emerging Markets- Microimage

What can a natural disaster do to the survivors?

Inspiration!

This is what Harsha Purasinghe, CEO of Microimage, got when Tsunami hit Sri Lanka and may other parts of the sub-continent. The mega natural disaster changed his life for ever and what he created out of it promises to be an early warning system for disaster leveraging mobile phones.

DEWN, that stands for Disaster and Emergency Warning Network, is Harsha's attempt to minimize loss of lives and property in the advent of disaster.

DEWN leverages existing deployed base of GSM in Sri Lanks in delivering these services augmented with some very intuitive features, all using SMS services. The innovation sets examples in designing and delivering innovation for the emerging markets.

Some of the lessons learnt during the creation of DEWN are:

• Using existing technology


• Usability challenges


• Adoption and implementation of the solution

A confident Harsha talks in length of technology, business model and other enablers around the innovation. All this just needs to be admired and get inspired from. No doubt Microimage won several accolades including GSM Annual Award of Innovation for 2007 and several other awards from National Science Foundation.

Innovation in Emerging Markets- Microsoft

Dr. Kentaro Toyama, the Co-Founder of Microsoft Research India identified creating technology for emerging markets as one of the key charters of this India lab. On of the areas of focus as a part of this ongoing research is on child education. Dr. Toyama discussed three of the high impact solutions that are been created and successfully launched to address the school based educational system in rural India. These solutions are:

• Multi-point mouse system: Here CPU, monitor and key board are shared between a group of students, whereas they would use multiple mouse with a different pointer color.


• Split screen computers: Here the screen could be shared between multiple students while they could have individual mouses and keyboards with shared CPU.


• Digital StudyHall: This is an attempt to bring good quality level education in digitized format to schools in rural parts of the country. Classes delivered by teachers in city schools are captured and then shared using a DVD player on TV to students in rural schools.

Each of these innovations have been significant in increasing the access to PC for students at a very low cost, thus living up to the commitment on delivering innovations for the emerging markets.

Customer Inspired Innovation- Touching Lines, Improving Life

The keynote address for the summit came from Dr. Shekhar Mitra, the Global R&D Vice President of Beauty Care, Procter & Gamble where he shared the philosophy, drivers and some of his personal experiences on customer driven innovation at the firm.

According to Dr. Mitra the key principles that drive innovation at the firm are:

• Innovation requires a new global view of scale


• Innovation occurs at the confluence of ideas


• Social responsibility sparks innovation

In an attempt to deliver meaningful and credible innovation to the consumer, the firm relies heavily on stakeholder collaboration at various stages of the consumer lifecycle. And all this is driven by a deep market insight which aids in mapping technology to needs.