S. Ramachander

Innovation, paradoxical as it might sound, is not new. Joseph Schumpeter had long ago identified it as the foremost driver of economic development in the post-industrial revolution era. Without the constant search for new products, processes and newe r ways of organising the business itself, as well as higher quality at progressively lower costs, mass manufacturing and mass markets could never have developed as they have. This is not to say that innovation comes easily to everyone or to every organisation, even when they recognise it as a survival need. The reasons for this are many. Managers do not realise the extent to which innovation has to be aligned to strategy and how an essentially free and uncharted path has still to be laid within the needs and circumstances of the organisation.

The difference between creativity and innovation lies in this – the latter has to eventually make business sense and at some point satisfy a sufficient number of customers in some new and improved way, and make a go of it. Therefore the management of innovation within organisations is essentially one of bringing apparently opposite ends to meet – logic and rationality on the one hand and unbridled imagination and free-wheeling on the other. It is not a task that most organisations are comfortable with. Fewer CEOs would take it up single-handedly unless they happen to be innovators or technology types in love with their craft. Yet Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Richard Branson are rare indeed, and the stuff of legends which tend to scare away the ordinary mortals among CEOs.

So how must companies approach innovation in India? How do they make it a part of the fabric of the organisation? Not many books have dealt with these issues yet.

Innovation originating in Industrial India, of home-grown products, is of relatively recent origin. It was only since the lifting of production controls and licences, letting competition enter the reckoning, which has made innovation even necessary for the CEO to think of it as a crucial part of his job. It is not surprising that there are very few well-discussed case histories of brands and businesses established through innovation in the recent decades. Even rarer are cases of survey research that have triggered a serious enquiry into why innovations succeed or do not, within organisations, and what executives think about the various issues that stand in the way of a more accelerated and widespread adoption of the innovation imperative. The book by the Chadhas makes up for this lacuna.

The Paradigm Innovation Survey, on which the book is based, was probably a first-mover in this field. It tried to establish what the managers themselves felt to be the bottlenecks to growth through innovation in their organisation, and the causes of new product failure.

As the authors declare, the driving force behind the research was the belief that we must create our own data bases, and case histories from the Indian reality – an approach that I for one have always wholeheartedly approved of and indeed despaired of finding in many places.

The truth of the matter is that the solutions that we borrow from the Western examples (of products or processes of managing) take for granted a far more affluent, post-industrial, and relatively more homogeneous consumer society, which India is certainly not. Therefore, if need be, we must be prepared to jettison some theories and frameworks popularised by the American business school cases and the biographies. This is easier said than done, because it takes hard work, considerable time and some money. Above all, it needs a few like-minded professionals who do not go into hiding the minute they hear of a survey on managerial practice as if they were about to be violated. The fears of security of information and exaggerated notions of confidentiality have prevented the emergence of really worthwhile cases and appropriate frameworks in India.

In this unusual book we find a combination of many ways of dealing with the myriad questions surrounding the management of the innovation process. The information content is rich, a good deal of it in reportage and anecdote with, as we said, an underlay of research findings too. Examples are drawn from companies of all shapes and sizes, Indian and multinational, verbatim quotations from managers are captioned as voices. The picture that emerges is not a simple one. For every strongly held and familiar principle, the opposite could also be true. For example, the race in new product development does not always go to the first-mover. There can be as many cases cited of those that came later and improved upon the first or made it better and less expensive.

One of the explanations that persuaded me in particular as to why innovation is so difficult to do effectively in Indian companies is the fact that we are still looking outward – to Japan or America – as the case may be for our inspiration. We prefer to take existing templates and apply them, in the hope of getting to launch and profits faster, without adequately appreciating the underlying philosophies and organisational cultures behind either management style or culture. And those need not always be applicable to us, as, for example, the individualism and free market ways of the West or the consensus and harmony approach of Japan. Historically nearly all our management tools and concepts are dawn from the US but our work culture and values are a mix of many influences and rarely as Anglo-Saxon the legal and institutional frameworks or the language that we work with. This makes transitions an extremely tricky issue.

The Chadhas have chosen to tackle a very difficult and complex subject and done it very smartly, with a sense of assurance that is so much needed in a pioneer. Above all they ought to be congratulated for maintaining a high standard of lucid and clear, uncluttered, prose.

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