The Hindu Business Line : Innovate to provide customers a unique experience: Prahalad

Mr M.S. Srinivasan, Secretary, Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (left), being welcomed by Mr Gopal Srinivasan, Chairman, CII Tamil Nadu, and Professor C.K. Prahalad (centre), University of Michigan, at the Fifth Member Fellowship organised by CII, in Chennai on Friday.

Our Bureau

Chennai, Feb. 22

The “passion to democratise commerce” – companies learning from their customers to meet individual customer’s needs, that ability will be the decisive factor in market leadership, according to Professsor C.K. Prahalad, University of Michigan, and international business consultant.

Addressing the Confederation of Indian Industry – Southern Region, Prof Prahalad illustrated with examples from modern businesses across a wide spectrum of businesses such as Google, Starbucks, Netflix and build-a-bear toys to show how these companies had innovated to provide each of their millions of customers a unique experience.

Emerging concepts

Indian businesses need to look at such emerging concepts, the next practice as opposed to the best practice. When benchmarking against means companies “gravitate towards mediocrity,” he said.

Companies should move away from the traditional wisdom of company-centred approach to efficiency evolved from the days of the Ford Model T or the Colt revolver to new approaches where companies work with their consumers – co-create – to offer a personalised experience, he said.

IT intensive practices

But this calls for business practices that are highly IT intensive, good business practice, mathematical modelling and analytics. In all these areas, India has the human resource and the expertise to excel.

The IT capability behind success stories has come from India, Prof Prahalad pointed out.

Mr M.S. Srinivasan, Secretary, Ministry for Petroleum and Natural Gas, said State governments should benchmark themselves against international leaders – some States in India are as big as some of the developed countries.

Some of the developed States become complacent comparing themselves against those less developed.

Indians have shown their ability to innovate and demonstrated their ability, whether it is a bank that finds a niche for itself in micro credit or the ‘dhabawallas’ who deliver over six lakh home cooked meals to office goers daily, he said. Knowledge and innovation would be the predominant resources that would dictate the success of businesses, Mr Srinivasan said.

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