The Growing Global Indian Innovation

Indian Americans are the top entrepreneurs among immigrant groups in the United States, and in setting up the largest number of engineering and technology companies over the past decade. Indian Americans account for 26 per cent of tech firms founded by immigrants as a whole. Eglis Milbergs, president of the Center for Accelerating Innovation, in this article touts the Duke University study wherein the biggest concentration of Indian entrepreneurs was found in California, Texas and New Jersey.

Ajay Singh Niranjan of The Great Human Capital believes that a brave new world beckons Indian Innovators and Entrepreneurs, and lots of opportunities exist for innovation and entrepreneurship to thrive in India, especially in areas such as technology, health care, education, rural marketing and social services.

In this article, Wipro's Innovation process is outlined in an interview with K.S. Viswanathan, chief-executive of sales at Wipro India.

Viswanathan states that "We (Wipro) have three types of innovation: technology innovation, process innovation and delivery innovation....At the apex end, we have an IT management council, where normally all decisions about breakthrough innovations or quantum innovations are taken....To assist the IT management council, we have an IT innovation council, where we go through four gates before an IT project gets done."

At Wipro, 5% of the total revenue of $3 billion comes from innovation projects according to Viswanathan. And to top it off, Azim Premji, CEO, gets involved in key innovative projects. Viswanathan says "Azim Premji has said that so many dollars of revenue per year are earmarked for innovative projects, largely for quantum innovations and those that lead to process innovations."

Arun Kottolli, a Management Consultant who maintains his own blog provides key advantages towards investing in India. Kottolli affirms that "India has now regained its innovative spirit. As a result, creativity can be seen in all walks of life in India. Indian companies have discovered the benefits of innovation and creativity.....Creativity in India can be seen in diversity of its languages, classical arts and music, literature, folk arts, construction etc."

One key metric: IBM, GE, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and sixty other top innovating companies have already setup their R&D centers in India.

Kottolli believes that Indians tend to opt for cost effective innovation.

Kottolli is a prolific blogger, and in another article, talks about the Indian Style of Innovation and Intellectual Property Creation.

Innovation at Infosys is grounded in the intellectual capital and the processes to rigorously train the employees:

-->The company’ key competitive advantage has been the intellectual capital of its employees. - Infosys Annual report 2006

-->In India Infosys took that idea (from GE) to heart and created the world’s largest employee training facility.

In a separate article, Kottolli writes that the "Indian automobile industry has demonstrated resounding success of Indian innovation. Bajaj Auto created DTSI technology and designed Pulsar bike, Maini Group’s Reva, Mahindra’s Scorpio, Tata Motors created Sumo, Safari, Indica, 209, 407, and a slew of trucks."

John Hagel recently visited India, and wrote an article on the Innovation and Talent in the Indian IT Industry.

"As JSB and I have written, there is an opportunity to pursue “innovation blowback” strategies, using the Indian market as a catalyst for breakthrough innovation in products and services that can then be used to support global attacker strategies designed to challenge incumbents in the more developed Western economies.

The Indian IT services industry could fuel enormous growth for the Indian economy by more aggressively supporting these innovation blowback strategies.

Ultimately, the opportunity would be to become leaders in the formation and orchestration of creation networks. This would require mastering open innovation management techniques to attract and mobilize talent, focus the innovation initiatives across multiple participants and accelerate commercialization and learning from these initiatives.

There’s no shortage of opportunities at both the product and process level to drive the growth of Indian IT services companies."

Gautam Ghosh, a key blogger on Management Consulting, provides a reason on why Indian IT companies have not fully embraced product innovation: "Because software exports are not taxed and services within the country are, the incentive for developing IT products and services for Indian firms is low for the Indian IT service providers."

Bottomline:

When I visited India in 2006, I was "wowed" by the growth of local innovation on all industry fronts: pharma, healthcare, autos, equipment, manufacturing, financials, retail, education, IT and more – not just the BPO and KPO industries. The solid growth in Indian economy is fueling entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity from Indians in every industry. This growth is even attracting MNCs to establish their R&D, manufacturing and entrepreneurship centers in India. My favorite story is that of a Taxi Driver in India who drives an indigenous Tata Indica and conducts all the routes and business logistics by simply using SMS and click-to-talk on mobile phone. I was amazed as to how efficiently the Taxi business of over 100 taxis effectively ran using the mobile phone as a communications, logistics and business device. The Taxi Driver uses click-to-talk to signal to the Taxi dispatch service that his current route is coming to a close; the Taxi dispatch service locates the nearest new customer request to the current physical location on where the Taxi driver is; the Taxi dispatch service leverages GPS and Location software; the Taxi Driver gets an SMS from the Taxi dispatch service prompting him on where to go next with a link that provides a map if needed; the Taxi Driver goes to that location and finds the passenger; now, he simply uses Click-to-talk to signal that he has picked up the passenger and he is on the next route. Wow!

Living in Bay Area, one always has a strong awareness of the top Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and even in the U.S. Now, we are seeing the growth of entrepreneurship and innovation from Indians in India and all over the world.

I am planning to create a report on the top 10 Indian Innovators from around the world. The names of Azim Premji, N R Narayana Murthy, Lakshmi Nivas Mittal, Anil and Mukesh Ambani, Ratan Tata, Kushal Pal Singh, Sunil Mittal, Ramesh Chandra, Kumar Birla and Gautam Adani immediately come to mind. However there are many more. Vyomesh Joshi at Hewlett Packard who manages HP’s multi-billion dollar imaging business must be considered in this list. The criteria at a minimum should be the innovators creating lasting companies or business units of at least $1 billion in annual revenue, real disruption in the marketplace, establishing a global brand and currently in active role (or within the last year). I would call upon the many aforementioned writers to co-create and get inputs on this report on the top 10 Indian Innovators.

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