The Invisible Innovations

Can India be the locus of innovation? In their recent book, India Inside , published by Harvard Business Review, professors Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam of the London Business School explore this question.

The starting point for them, they say, was when they posed the question: Where are the Indian Googles, the Indian iPads and Viagra?

“We made several trips to India to find this and to our surprise found a lot of invisible innovation going on in India,” says Nirmalaya Kumar. “You can look at the innovation story in India as a glass half-empty or half-full,” he says, as he along with co-author Puranam, shares the process of discovery and writing the book with BrandLine .

“The innovation was taking place in a form that we did not anticipate,” says Puranam.

Apart from the visible innovations, which take the form of new products or services, and gets recognition, the two contend that four other types of innovation go on in India. And this remains invisible to end consumers around the world. The book tries to show these examples.

The first is what they call globally segmented innovation led primarily by the MNCs. So, when a company such as GE develops global products from its Indian R&D centres or an Intel chip gets designed and developed at a lab in Bangalore.

The second form is Outsourcing innovation - this goes on at companies that offer their R&D services on demand. For instance, HCL Technologies designing two mission critical systems for Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, delivered in response to a need from the aircraft maker.

The third type of innovation is process innovation - where intelligence is injected into firms. The call centre industry in India is an example of this, points out Puranam, citing company 24/7 Customer's data-driven technique. “They have accumulated historical data on customers calling in and emotional tones of voices. So if a demanding customer were to call, the company looks at the data and routes the call to the most experienced agent.” This is serious statistical modelling and unique to India, he says.

And the fourth is the most invisible of Indian innovations – the global service delivery model. “It's a management innovation – the unique way in whch the Indian outsourcing industry manages globally distributed work.”

And the increasing browning of top management teams across the world also spells a managerial innovation.

Like Intel Inside, powering computers, it's India Inside many global firms, is the contention of the two authors. We just need to brand it the same way Intel does.

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