Slowly but surely the product ecosystem in India is getting better. I looked at it six months back and since then it has get more fleshed out. Yet much work remains to be done. Read on…
Archive for the 'innovation' Category
Product Ecosystem in India: Progress But More Needs to be Done
Published by May 1st, 2007 in innovation, software industry and entrepreneurship. 5 CommentsIn Praise of Jugaad Innovation
Published by April 18th, 2007 in innovation and entrepreneurship. 15 CommentsIn the last two weeks Carlos Ghosn (CEO, Renault) and Rick Wagoner (CEO, GM) have praised jugaad innovation in Indian manufacturing. They are putting their finger on the most important characteristic of the Indian innovation ecosystem. India has leant that oftentimes less is more and innovation happens, not despite, but because of limited resources.
Hype has surrounded the word innovation and a backlash is underway. Although Clayton Christensen has introduced a useful framework around disruptive and sustaining innovation, a commonly understood taxonomy hasn’t taken shape. So let me take a shot at proposing a layman’s terminology…
Entrepreneurship Education Takes Root in India
Published by March 21st, 2007 in innovation and entrepreneurship. 0 CommentsSramana writes that India is poised to see an entrepreneurship boom in the next 10 years. She is right! Entrepreneurship is going global. VCs are partly responsible. Also playing a role is the spread of entrepreneurship education. High quality entrepreneurship education centers have sprouted in all the major cities…
This is an interpretive look at the innovation landscape in India as seen through the lens of the NASSCOM Innovation Awards. It takes a rather unconventional view of what underpins innovation in India concluding that the Indian innovation experience is quite different from the Western model.
Business Week tallies up a nice list of 5 promising crowdsourcing initiatives.
Lack of Breakthrough Innovation by Big Companies
Published by January 18th, 2007 in innovation and software industry. 1 CommentBig companies can do breakthrough innovation in one of two ways. They can either emulate an entrepreneurial company much like what Apple has done in recent years. Or it can leverage its size to follow the Toyota and Honda’s Kaizen method of breakthrough innovation. Right now, unfortunately, most IT companies are doing neither.
An Incumbent’s Struggle with Disruptive Innovation – The AT&T Microchip Story
Published by January 12th, 2007 in innovation. 47 CommentsThis is a story about how AT&T missed the bus with microchips. It shows how difficult it is for incumbents to succeed with disruptive innovation.
Bad News about TI’s LoCosto Chipset
Published by January 12th, 2007 in innovation, mobile industry and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 0 CommentsTI’s Locosto chipset is having technical problems because of which it might lose the early mover advantage.
Computer Science With a Soul
Published by January 11th, 2007 in innovation and software industry. 1 CommentThe kind of “soulful” revolution that economics is seeing today is also strongly needed in computer science. I am not suggesting that the “old” computer science of operating systems, programming languages, database systems and networking is passé. No, instead, my view is that we need to build on the foundational subjects to address the new research questions that have suddenly become important… Happily some of this change is starting to happen…
The New Data Center Leading-Edge
Published by January 1st, 2007 in innovation, software industry and adaptable infrastucture. 3 CommentsThe leading-edge of innovation in the data center is now firmly in the consumer space with eBay, Google and Amazon leading the charge… Ten years back the focus was on tuning the applications to get the best performance. Now the focus is on tuning the infrastructure to get the best performance. Commodity building-locks and custom-software to tie it all together is the new norm in data center infrastructure… This rise of adaptable infrastructure is creating a new “lean” data center model… This current leading-edge in data centers will produce its own hot startups and segments…
Innovation Is Like a Bamboo Thicket
Published by December 21st, 2006 in innovation and entrepreneurship. 0 CommentsIndia-based entrepreneurs don’t often realize that a single innovation, no matter how good, doesn’t get results. A collection of different innovations need to be clumped together to get results. They need to think of innovation as a bamboo thicket rather than as an oak tree.
Joel Spolsky had earlier suggested that that simplicity is not about fewer features but about the right features and “elegance”. This time he writes about elegance…
Tom Peters makes his iconoclastic points in a poetic form. Below are 2 of 14 samples. The whole presentation is available here (thanks Giri for sharing).
They say/acknowledge, “Okay, we need revolution.”
I say “REVOLUTION.”
They say “fast follower.”
I say “battered and bruised leader.”
They say “Conglomerate & Imitate!”
I say “Create & Innovate!”
They say “Market share.”
I say “Market CREATION.”
They […]
Growth Anatomy Series Roundup
Published by December 18th, 2006 in innovation, software industry, entrepreneurship, mobile industry, bottom-of-the-pyramid and roundups. 0 CommentsThis series started innocently enough as a follow-up to my SandHill.com article but somehow it quietly picked-up momentum. It covers a fair amount of ground about how to go about bottom-on-the-pyramid opportunities and why doing that is important to the software industry. Below are all the articles in this series. Check them out if you have missed any.
Growth Anatomy: Call to Action
Published by December 16th, 2006 in innovation, software industry, entrepreneurship and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 1 CommentSuccess with BOP requires breakthrough product architectures, process models and/or business models. Often it also requires building new market structures and value chains. All this can only happen with in-market incubation and constraint-based management. It’s not easy, but it can be done. As we have seen, telecom, PC, semiconductor and healthcare industries are doing it. So far the enterprise software industry is watching from the sidelines. Why is this the case?
Growth Anatomy: Building a New Value Chain
Published by December 14th, 2006 in innovation, software industry and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 2 CommentsWe have looked at several bottom-of-the-pyramid examples from the IT industry so far. Airtel vs. Verizon was about breakthrough business models. X0-1 vs. Classmate laptops was about breakthrough product architectures. TI’s LoCosto cellphone chipsets was about a breakthrough process model. eChoupal and the failed GramaTeller ATM was about creating a new market structure. Today’s example is from healthcare and is about building a new value chain.
Yesterday I pointed to Joel Spolsky thoughtful post on simplicity. I found an interesting IHT article by Alice Rawsthorn about Apple’s take on functional aesthetics. It supports Joel’s point of view. In the article, Jonathan Ive, SVP of Industrial Design at Apple summarizes the Apple philosophy…
Growth Anatomy: Thinking Beyond Product and Company Architecture
Published by December 11th, 2006 in innovation, software industry and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 0 CommentsIn this series we have looked at two bottom-of-the-pyramid product examples so far. The first one, which was about one-laptop-per-child showed that success hinges on confronting legacy product architectures. The second example, about TI’s ultra-low-cost cellphone chipset, illustrated that sometimes breakthrough changes are needed not so much inside the product but inside the company (by changing the way of doing things significantly). But at times, the focus has to be neither inside the product nor inside the company but out in the market. Not addressing the market architecture issues can be a point of failure.
Joel Spolsky has a thoughtful post on what simplicity is and isn’t. He says: If you’re using the term “simplicity” to refer to a product in which the user model corresponds closely to the program model, so the product is easy to use, fine, more power to ya…
India’s Telecom Boom: Missing the Point
Published by December 10th, 2006 in innovation and mobile industry. 0 CommentsEconomist has an article on India’s booming mobile market. India is adding 6.6m new subscribers a month and is growing faster than China. The article says that this growth is unlikely to peter out soon. There are 136m subscribers today and the industry expects to get to 500m by 2010. But the Economist doesn’t do justice to the real story although it alludes to it when it says that “Bharti, in particular, is attracting attention from telecoms firms worldwide because of its innovative business model”.
Growth Anatomy: Taking Inspiration from Ultra Low Cost Cellphone
Published by December 6th, 2006 in innovation, organizational design, mobile industry and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 2 CommentsWe saw from the OLPC example that radical value engineering requires confronting incumbent product architectures. This is one of the reasons why upstarts have an advantage. Another reason why this is so difficult for incumbents is because you have to confront the current way of doing things inside the firm. Occasionally market leaders succeed in doing an orbit shift in their way of doing things. Texas Instruments is an example of that in the cellphone chipset market.
Growth Anatomy: Likely Lessons of OLPC
Published by December 4th, 2006 in innovation, software industry and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 0 CommentsIf you are with me so far, you know that I have argued here and here that the enterprise software industry must use the emerging lean model as an invitation to develop bottom-of-the-pyramid opportunities. This calls for radically rethinking the value/price equation. A simple thumb-rule is that if the new product isn’t less that a fifth, yes that’s right, a fifth of the price, it isn’t going to unlock the market at the bottom-of-the-pyramid. Naturally this is hard to do. But it can be done. Today I look at an example from the PC industry.
Can Microsoft Be Called Innovative?
Published by December 3rd, 2006 in innovation and software industry. 2 CommentsThere is an interesting debate that I came across on Wall Street Journal Online, Is Microsoft Driving Innovation Or Playing Catch-Up With Rivals? (courtesy Mukul Kumar’s blog)… It’s a testament to Microsoft’s success that they are now locked into the Kaizen pathway of innovation. Let’s not forget, despite Silicon Valley’s protestations, this can yield valuable outcomes.
Growth Anatomy: Can’t Escape In-Market Incubation Any Longer
Published by December 1st, 2006 in innovation, software industry, organizational design and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 0 CommentsIn my last post in this series I had suggested that the enterprise software industry is being forced to embrace the “lean” model requiring two separate strategy responses. The first is a reflexive response of consolidation and preservation. The second is a considered response of leveraging the lean model to build out a new business at the bottom-of-the-pyramid. This second strategy response is hard to do. And the IT industry is not doing it.
