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.