Fifth India Innovation Summit '09- Day 2- Panel Discussion- 2

The second and the last of the Panel Discussions was themed around 'Role of Innovation in an Economic Downturn'. The panelists were:

• C E Veni Madhavan, IISc Bangalore
• Raj Kumar Khatri, Commissioner for Industrial Development & Director of Comm and Ind,
  Government of Karnataka
• Bharat Kumar, IT Editor, Hindu
• I Vijaya Kumar, Chief Technology Officer, Wipro Ltd

Veni started by describing the Medici Effect: Which helped start the Renaissance movement in Venice. In Downturn and challenging times creating a confluence of people will help innovation. His key message was that there is also a need for corporate scientific responsibility to come fore and help and nurture research. The benefit will in turn be accelerated innovation that can be leveraged for business benefits.

I Vijayakumar provided the industry/practitioner perspective. He said -Innovation is about inclusiveness. There are typically two kinds we can look at- in-the-box and out-of-the-box innovations. In the box are innovations within the existing environment and systems: innovations around productivity, services and people. Outside the box would be more on customers focused. The greatest challenge for innovation would be to define the problem statement – finding technologies to solve is the next step.
IVK provided an example of an interesting and innovative step in the organization – primarily from a Green perspective and which also resulted in cost takeouts. It was -working out lower power consumption in the labs over the weekends (when consumption is @ 95% but attendance in less than 3%). He described the initial resistance from the lab administrators and the eventual gains.

Bharat Kumar opined that Indians innovate all the time. He gave an example of everyday innovative/ inventive sense in Indians. A vegetable vendor who makes his sales by roaming with his push cart on the streets of Chennai on hot afternoons – takes a different trick of shouting out his wares. While the rest of them shout out the vegetables they have for sale, this vendor shouts out the possible dishes you can make with them. He would scream “Sambar!” and then proceed to narrate all the vegetables you would need to make it!
In effect, he helps the lady of the house visualize all the options she has for the night’s dinner and help her make a choice and come by and make a purchase.

Three key points from the session were:

• One must be cautious about terming some innovations as mere cost cutting and not recognize them.
• Tolerance to failure should increase.
• Leadership is needed. Ability to place people who excel and are passionate will engender innovation.

And that was the end of two eventful days.

Fifth India Innovation Summit '09- Day 2- Panel Discussion- 1

Now's the time for Panel Discussion and the topic for the first panel was- Targeted IT Investments for Business Innovation. Here the panelists were:

• S Sadagopan, Director, IIIT Bangalore
• Diwakar Nigam, CEO, New Gen Software Technologies
• Subu Goparaju, Vice President & Head - SETLabs, Infosys

Prof. Sadgopan quipped that constraints help in aiding innovation. Gave an example of Bank of India. Who were one of the first to do a total outsourcing job. Technical and execution constraints helped them take that decision. That helped them go the path of significantly lesser expenses, and complete automation within 2 years or so as opposed to what would 7 years. Along the line, they crafted SLA norms that pretty much became the template for others to follow when crafting their own outsourcing engagements.
Another example was that of Tirupati Tirumala Temple. The temple authorities have large queues to deal with and came up with a specification that this problem has to be done away with and the technique applied should be executable in less that one minute and cost not more that one rupee per person. And he went on to describe the famous bar coded wrist band – how they cam about the technique. And the other challenges along the way – ensuring that it was water proof ( even if people bathed in the temple ponds ), could not be removed easily and passed on to others and was proven to be safe.
So constraints help. In the case of downturns too, it can be taken advantage for creating winning innovations. The other message was about how IT can be leveraged for solving this problem.

Diwakar Nigam opined that in downturn, the first response is to go on the cost cutting path, and IT can help in this. In Downturn, Business Intelligence and Mining can help – to increase models and increase market shares. Another cost takeout can be by using low cost BPM processes and streamlining business functions. Basically business agility is important in a downturn and IT can be leveraged for the same.

Subu mentioned that during downturn, more focus is on open innovation and open source in his organization. Focus in general in IT innovation will be on improved analytics, collaboration, and efficiency. He said, the current IT adoption in India can be improved. The IT is taken to rural through mobile phones and there is a lot of scope for innovation there.

It too was a well recieved discussion.

Fifth India Innovation Summit '09- Day 1- Opening Session

The theme for the Fifth India Innovation Summit hosted at Bangalore between 12-13 June was- Role of Innovation in an Economic Downturn - The India Advantage. Quite relevant and timely. With close to 360 attendees and over 35 speakers, the event was a delight to anyone keen on learning more on how innovation unfolds at India. Here's a quick summary of the Day- 1 of the event.

The event started with the Chairman of CII Karnataka- T Parabrahman setting the context of this fifth edition of the summit. Apart from sharing the good practices from the companies around innovation especially in the downturn, the event focused on facilitating breakthroughs in Small and Medium Enterprise (SME).

Then the Chairman of Infosys- Kris Gopalakrishnan gave the theme address impressing on how the times are ripe for India to play a leading role in the innovation space. He opined that one always sees the cycle of boom --> greed --> bust --> new normal. Case in point being the Internet Boom and Bust. India enjoys the demographic divide, huge talent base, untapped markets, and a good education system. Therefore India is a compelling / un avoidable investment to succeed. An illustration is the phenomenal growth of the India IT Industry, especially Bangalore. Today 40% exports of India are from Bangalore, it is the largest IT/ ITES ecosystem in the country and has taken India to the global landscape.

Then came Azim Premji, the Chairman of Wipro. Hinting on the number of companies that have fell off the Fortune 500 companies into oblivion, he observed that how firms (even large ones) often miss the revolutions. In his words, "It is very important for senior leadership to be sensitive to signals, especially negative signals. They need to do the job of shaking complacency, demanding stretch. For innovation to work, there should be a framework of accountability, measurement, time-frames of deliveries and ROI based (affect the bottomline). Innovation can be not only in products and services, it can also be in quality processes, productivity improvements, financial discipline and business models – the last being most important."
In his view imbibing a culture of innovation is vital. The necessary conditions being:

• Appreciate that success creates its own gravity. This gravity creates comfort zones. As a result ideas will get shot down at all levels. Leadership should generate sufficient escape velocity to break this gravity. Can be done by setting stretch goals.
• Look at innovation from everyone. Everywhere. Customer is the best source. Develop the art of listening
• Actively bring in people into the organization who are not clones of who are already in. This goal gets challenged by the current en-mass recruitment trends that happens at lateral levels. Because en-mass generates templates, and downward delegation. Important to find people who can make you uncomfortable.
• Days of isolated innovation are over. Innovation is multi-functional, multi-geographical. Teaming is an important skill to look for.
• Encourage people to fight and disagree on the idea after it's matured to a level. If done earlier, good ideas could get killed.
• Allow creative failures. This is fundamental to innovation process. Failures should be forgiven as long as the lessons are remembered.

A very well received talk and a good start to the event.

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.