The Hindu Business Line : Innovating India

It was less than two years since Rajiv Narang had landed his first job and the young engineer-MBA was already thirsting to break free of the grind. Around that time, he chanced upon two books that altered the course of his life: Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, a history of the physical universe, and a treatise on creative thinking by Maltese psychologist-physician Edward de Bono.

“These books awakened in me the excitement of discovery I’d never experienced before,” he recalls.

Narang was left pondering why his college and workplace hadn’t offered him anything quite like that. “There I found my calling: I wanted to work in the area of creativity and innovation.”

Born thus two decades ago was Erehwon, which started out with a creative thinking programme for school students and is today involved in enabling organisations to leverage innovation for breakthrough results. “As a student, I remember learning in a rote manner and never being taught to apply knowledge. Our earliest initiative was an effort to change that. It ran in 150 schools for half-a-decade, before we began working with companies in 1992,” says the 46-year-old founder-CEO of the Bangalore-based Erehwon Innovation Consulting. “It is, as yet, an unfinished dream.”

Creativity vs. innovation

Erehwon — which is “nowhere” spelt backwards — has set out to demonstrate that innovation and creativity are not interchangeable and that innovation, by nature, is different from creativity in that it is inherently practical and useful.

“Innovation starts with the understanding of creativity,” says Narang. “Teaching people to be creative doesn’t by itself lead to organisational innovation.”

EIC’s innovation model aims at helping organisations “create a new orbit of differentiation and growth — not incremental but quantum”. In popular perception, the idea of innovation is largely limited to breakthroughs ranging from the light bulb to the personal computer.

That fact that innovation is more about effective action than plain ideation is not widely understood. “Traditionally, innovation has been equated with invention and, therefore, with technology, R&D and products. But much of it in the last 20 years has come by way of new business models, processes and strategies. Product innovation hasn’t contributed even a fourth of that,” reasons Narang.

De-risking the unknown

Around the time ECI took its first steps in the world of innovation, India had just begun to liberalise and industry was grappling with competition. “The need to innovate was no longer just important, it was urgent.” According to Narang, this need has grown exponentially over time. While EIC’s clientele predominantly consisted of software companies until the turn of the century, much of it today comprises organisations operating in the market.

“The number of companies merely looking to teach their employees the art of creative thinking to solve problems has diminished,” reveals Narang. He maintains that conventional models of organisational innovation are largely designed for efficiency and not innovation.

“Most organisations have failed at managing innovation in a linear manner,” he says. Managing innovation, he adds, isn’t like managing Six Sigma: It takes much more than deploying innovation managers and tools.

But isn’t the talent to innovate inborn? “Yes,” says Narang, “but coaching that talent to reach its whole fruition is the job we do. The job is to teach that community or organisation to combine talents, think creatively and act innovatively.” The process, he explains, starts with an assessment of how an organisation thinks internally and externally.

Next come breaking through the gravity or the forces that pull down all things new, and creating escape velocity or taking on challenges that cannot be addressed with existing know-how. “We don’t start with something existing and the challenge isn’t so much about risk-taking as it is about de-risking the unknown.”

Given that EIC’s clientele comprises large organisations, one wonders if scale is a prerequisite for innovation to succeed. “Not really,” Narang clarifies. “It is just something our model of high-value, high-price and low-volume consulting entails. However, it does not prevent us from working with smaller organisations. Our heart really is in creating an innovation movement in the country.”

Thought leadership

Towards this end, EIC has partnered with Marico Innovation Foundation to recognise business as well as social innovation, and is working with the Karnataka government on a strategy to improve the state of primary education and rural healthcare.

“The biggest value of innovation is going to be social innovation, the way we handle poverty or water problems,” Narang opines. Apart from anchoring HR innovation awards with the Delhi Management Association, EIC is also running innovation programmes with 12 of the 20 leading management schools in the country and hopes to take it to 100 leadership institutions.

For EIC, which began expanding its footprint across Asia-Pacific in 2000 followed by Europe in 2005, and is all set to start operations in the US, innovation begins at home.

“We are constantly doing internally all that we talk about, setting ourselves out-of-the-box challenges such as becoming global thought leaders and making the world appreciate the differentiated value, and not merely the cost advantages, that India can deliver.”

With most thought leadership emanating from the West, Narang observes that the country of our origin is a disadvantage for most consulting organisations.

“Our pursuit is to turn this around. The next challenge we have identified is to develop a long-distance, virtual model of innovation coaching.” As it appears, the idea of innovation is catching on fast.

“We find that the buyers of innovation are now the CEOs, who are increasingly willing to accept the current limitations of their organisations and are doing so while they are at the peak, not in crisis.”

Stories of change

Erehwon Innovation Consulting (EIC) has catalysed several tales of innovation with the likes of the world's second-largest spirits company, which successfully prototyped a radical new product and a marketing breakthrough; an IT company that has grown four times over by adopting a different growth strategy; a $2-million group of 35 people that has bloomed into a $9 million, 200-strong group; an insurance organisation that has doubled sales; an automobile company that achieved process breakthroughs to notch up a 300 per cent jump in its sales and many more.

While Philips India has today departed from its tradition of extending Europe-born ideas to India and is working overtime on breakthrough ideas "for the bottom of the pyramid", Marico has overcome its droopy strike-rate of new products and added a hugely successful Kaya skin clinic to a portfolio dominated by just Parachute and Saffola.

EIC has also worked on an unusual project to help Tehelkabounce back as a paper. "It was quite a challenge to apply innovation to a company that had no money and was being persecuted."

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