Many innovations are taking place at institutions such as IIT Madras and companies need to adopt them to create products and solutions,according to Gopichand Katragadda, Group Technology and Innovation Officer, Tata Sons.

Culture of innovation happens when “you create with freedom (like a child), nurture with passion (of a maniac) and change with detachment (like a warrior),” he said while delivering the keynote address at the three-day Deshpande-Gopalakrishnan Symposium at IIT Madras.

First symposium

The first symposium organised by the Gopalakrishnan-Deshpande Centre for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at IIT Madras along with IIT Bombay and Deshpande Foundation is a gathering of practitioners, administrators, and academicians focused on promoting and accelerating innovation and entrepreneurship across academic environment.

“We need more foundations such as Gopalakrishnan-Deshpande Centre not only in India but across the world,” he said.

The foundation was jointly set up by Gururaj Deshpande, Chairman, Deshpande Foundation, and Kris Gopalakrishnan, Co-Chairman & former CEO, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Each company has a different approach towards innovation. For instance, GE uses Six Sigma approach while the Tata group uses the Tata Business Excellence Model that will be able to get teams to work together and bring out creative ideas that will be many times individually driven. There is no way an individual idea is going to be successful without this phase.

Customer preferences

For instance, officials at Procter & Gamble go and live with their end-customers to determine what they should be doing. When it introduced diaper in China, it first made cheap ones thinking the country was a large market for low-cost products. But it did not sell.

They lived with customers and figured out that they had their own cloth diaper during day time that worked very well but it was useful to bring night-time diaper that will be more expensive as it will last nearly eight hours, he said.

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