The Hindu Business Line : Best business ideas

STRATEGY+BUSINESS magazine has for the past three years been conducting, in conjunction with the consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, a competition in leading innovations of the year, by inviting the public and Internet users to vote for 10 of the "the most original, insightful, and effective" among them. The brief gist of the winners for 2005 is to alert Indian economic players to the possibility of profitable application of these ideas in the Indian context.

Leading the pack is the tactic of "virtual scale" which brings in economies of scale through alliances, without burdening the balance-sheet ortaking capital-intensive routes of organic growth and acquisitions. It helps companies to leverage, Judo player-like, their assets and capabilities by means of strategic partnerships.

Next comes the idea of creating more value at lower cost through cross-functional collaboration in the critical early stages of design, where 80 per cent of the cost and value are locked into a product or service. Close on its heels is the emphasis on intelligent innovation (as distinguished from R&D creativity), drawing on customer insight, global network, emerging prospects and organisational toning up. Yet another best practice has to do with getting the most from outsourcing by tightening up internal management, improving supplier relationships, and competitively re-bidding outsourced services.

The remaining six winners provide new approaches to sales-intensive retailing, inculcating staff in best practices, overcoming barriers to change, better network management, value pricing for suppliers, and comprehensive financial reporting. facilitating coherence within the systems, links to the outside world, evaluation of balances, credibility of audit, and appraisal of new processes.

The effort is a variant of the one of 2001, in which the IBM Chairman had invited all its personnel of whatever rank located worldwide to e-mail ttheir suggestions for achieving organisational excellence, and selected some 4000 out of them for implementation.

India's enterprises too will benefit tremendously if business and industry federations and NASSCOM undertake similar exercises to stimulate original and creative thinking on the best business models and innovations in governance, management and technology.

B. S. Raghavan

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