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Our Bureau

Mumbai , Feb. 16

WIPRO's innovation initiative has started to pay off and the company expects to intensify its focus on innovation as a tool to drive future growth, the Chairman, Mr Azim Premji, said on Thursday.

Addressing a press conference at the Nasscom 2006 Leadership Summit, Mr Premji said that the annualised revenues generated through Wipro's innovation initiative and its 40 centres of excellence (CoEs) stood at over $100 million, accounting for five per cent of the company's revenues. "We expect to increase the revenues generated through innovation efforts to around 10 per cent of our revenues in three years," he said, adding that the company would make ongoing investments in tools, technologies and solutions that would drive innovation.

Wipro has set up an Innovation Council that acts as an internal venture capital funding project, which would improve business productivity for the company and its customers, and "improve our ability to win deals and reduce the cost of delivery."

At present, Wipro's innovation initiative and its CoEs have a team of close to 500 professionals working on a portfolio of projects. These projects are in areas of process improvements; execution; new service lines for delivering traditional onsite services through a global delivery model; business solutions such as gas distribution solutions; business process management solutions and R&D such as the development of intellectual properties and patents in wireless applications and mobile telephony.

"We institutionalised the spirit of innovation six years ago and are now deriving the business value from these investments," Mr Premji said, adding that 29 of Wipro's new engagements last quarter came as a direct or indirect result of innovations. The latest innovation at Wipro is a `Global Command Centre,' which offers shared service solutions from a remote location. Mr Premji said his company is working in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology to develop a solar device for the education segment to power six to eight computers within a primary school.

Earlier delivering the keynote on `Winning and Innovation,' Mr Premji shared his thoughts on creating a culture of innovation. "Innovation comes from applying creativity or applying thought. It is about action versus ideas. It is about implementation as much as it is about design," he said.

Negating the growing concerns about the possible erosion in margins of the Indian software service vendors, he said that the average profit per employee of an Indian service company is $12,000 as against $23,000-25,000 for multinational vendors such as IBM or Accenture. Since the average profit is quite low, Indian vendors will be able to enhance it to protect their margins.

More Stories on : Events | Software | Non-conventional Energy | Wipro Ltd

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