I was asked to write an article describing the IT innovation landscape in India. The article has come out in a book form (called “Top 100 IT innovators”) and has been given to every attendee here at NASSCOM’s India Leadership Forum at Mumbai. This article is…
an interpretive look at the innovation landscape in India as seen through the lens of the NASSCOM Innovation Awards. It is necessarily a subjective perspective focusing on weak signals and emerging trends. It also takes a rather unconventional view of what underpins innovation in India concluding that the Indian innovation experience is quite different from the Western model.
My take is that India doesn’t have one innovation ecosystem but has four distinct, yet overlapping, IT innovation ecosystems. I describe all the four in the article concluding that the jugaad-innovation ecosystem, mostly associated with IT Services and BPO, is the most mature. The products ecosystem is getting there. The bottom-of-the-pyramid innovation ecosystem is off to great start. It’s still nascent but promising. And clearly, what needs most attention is the invention based ecosystem.
I also point out that if one looks through conventional eyes of invention-based innovation; India doesn’t yet have a strong story to tell. But this would be an incomplete conclusion. India’s IT innovation landscape is not a replica of what exists in the West and will probably never be one. I don’t regard this is a deficiency; instead it’s a definite strength. I am cautiously optimistic about the future.
One thing that I didn’t include in the article are the challenges facing different pockets of the Indian IT industry. I have some thoughts about this that I’ll share in a later post.
The PDF of the article is here. It’s the final content minus the layout design (to keep the file size small).
[Update: An abridged version of this article has been published in Indian Business School magazine, Insight (Mar’07).]
Well, there have been compulsions which forced Indian corporates to come out with new strategies to survive, but these cant be called innovations. By coining a new term called “jugaad inovations”, you are only providing legitimacy to some of the short term thinking and crude fixing to problems and not taking a systematic long term approach.
Quick fix remedies has to some extent become the bane of India’s progress. People continue to live under a false sense of comfort and complacency because the quick fix seems to have taken the sting out of the problem, for now and gives the impression that people who are accountable have taken action. But more often than not, people have never fixed the problem.
In some cases, there’s a deeper Indian psyche at play. It does seem to me that many Indians feel more indispensable and feel valued when they have to solve a problem, rather than having done something to solve the problem.
>> By coining a new term called “jugaad inovations”, you are only providing legitimacy to some of the short term thinking and crude fixing to problems and not taking a systematic long term approach.
Hi Subbaraman - When it comes to public policy, the “crude quick-fix” still rules. Bangalore traffic is an example. They will build a flyover at one place only to move the congestion to another point a kilometer away. There is no systems-thinking visible here. It’s disheartening.
But I think things have evolved when it comes to the private sector. What was “crude quick-fix” has now become experiment-based baby-steps, often grounded in proven continuous-improvement methodologies. I mention Tata Steel in the article as an example. Another one to look at is Bajaj Auto. They were, like Tata Steel, a product of license-raj – bloated plants, outdated technology, etc. When things opened Honda almost wiped them out. But they have clawed back and are now challenging Honda in almost every two-wheeler segment in India. It’s a classic example of how small innovations accumulate and become significant process or business innovations if the cadence of innovation is high.
Last night I was at a dinner and was chatting with a person who heads global sourcing for one of the ABB business units in India. He pointed out that small firms who started off delivering poor quality are now their best suppliers. In one product category they used to have a return rate of 1.2% from their old non-Indian supplier base which they felt was good. But this small Indian supplier who started off being way worse than the global norm has steadily improved to point of having a return rate of less than 0.2%. Although he didn’t mention other names, he insisted that this was not a solitary example.
What I am suggesting in my article is that the innate jugaad mindset can be harnessed for process and business model innovation. A number of companies, big and small, IT and non-IT, have learnt how to do this successfully. This knowledge is becoming more dispersed within the ecosystem and therefore will continue to underpin more success stories.
Will this jugaad innovation energy touch the public policy and government service delivery system some day? I sure hope it does, though I am not optimistic of it happening in the short-term. Some say that I am wrong. They point to the turnaround of Indian Railways as an example of what’s possible. I don’t see things the same way but then that would be a subject of another post by itself.
Nice article…From a global perspective (and I would suggest from India’s), what is more interesting is the vertical BPO, the BoP and multi-ethnic solutions…those are innovations because not much is being doing on those in many other parts of the world …what the Big Indian firms are doing is not innovation any more - the GDM was an innovation 10 years ago…and as I have written before it really is IDM not GDM, which cannot balance out some of the heated Indian labor market issues.
You may enjoy also my post on global innovation
http://florence20.typepad.com/renaissance/2007/02/innovation_geog.html