Nissan Motor’s first and only digital innovation hub coming up here would look to develop technologies for all products, electric, automatic or connected cars, said Tony Thomas, Corporate Vice President and CIO.

In a chat ahead of signing an MoU with the Kerala government, he said the technology should work across electric vehicles, autonomous cars or even the connected cars that it sells.

Launch pad

“Because the automotive industry is transforming to being more digital in every possible manner, we are trying to re-anchor ourselves to a more digital technology company,” Thomas said. “In that sense, this would be our first initiative to achieve this transformation. We’re trying to launch from here the new way of new capabilities, new technology, and news way of doings.”

Thomas refused to tie down the innovation to any single technology. “We are not looking at a specific domain for this; we would decide on the talent available. My raw material is talent.”

For instance, if it finds more of data people, the focus would probably shift to artificial intelligence or big data. But if more software people are available, the focus area could likely be app development or mobile capabilities. “That’s kind of the model that we’re thinking about, but at the end of the day we would cover the entire spectrum. From left to right, for all regions across the globe and all types of technology capabilities. That’s what we’re going to do here,” he said.

Transformation

Explaining Kerala for hosting the facility, he said the idea was borne out of the realisation that if Nissan wanted to transform itself, it needed for more internal technology capabilities. So it would need to hire more. The obvious choice was to hire from my existing locations, or to hire from a new location.

“If I don’t hire big enough and that too a critical mass, I won’t be able to change the style of working. The existing style meant that projects ran for longer, and were very predictable. They were aligned to the waterfall methodology where you design, you devleop, you test...but this has to change to a different way of doing things. You can’t transform unless you have a critical mass,” he said.

So the choice was to start something net new so that the new team would have have those capabilities required to transform the model.

Choice of place

“Then we looked at pretty much across the globe for a place. The costs was obviously a determining factor. We didn’t want to invest in very high-cost locations, not just from the feasibility point of view but also from awareness that it would be harder to attract the right talent, my raw material,” Thomas said.

India suggested itself for a few reasons. One, lots of the Nissan’s suppliers, the third party IT services providers, have a huge presence locally. So already a lot of people who serve Nissan are in India.

“We’ve an established presence in the market here thanks to the Chennai plant, the product line and the fact that we're pushing for new traction here. As for number two, availability of talent. I’ve been hiring for leadership positions from across the globe. Most of the senior-most and smartest people are from India. So we thought why not India? If I were to base it anywhere else, we end up recruiting the same people,” Thomas said.

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