In an interesting twist it outsources its IT function to IBM, a US company that is establishing a sizable service presence in India.
While large Western operators looking to enter emerging markets such as India may do well to look at Airtel’s approach, Indian companies will stand to significantly benefit if they adopt Vodafone’s passion for above-average customer service, global 3G connectivity, and pricing models that cater to individual and enterprise users.
To further go around what’s new and interesting in what is being labeled as the world’s hottest mobile market one needs to extend the discussion beyond operators, to content providers, mobile application developers, users and the regulator. A necessary requirement for mobile voice and data services is the availability of the necessary spectrum. The country is now on the verge of re-farming spectrum from the Defense towards the forthcoming 3G deployment. In a presentation I made to the TRAI in September I outlined the benefits of conducting a combinatorial auction over a beauty contest for a variety of reasons that are beyond the scope of this article. The interested reader is referred to http://www.isb.edu/citne/
news.html for a series of related articles. What is critical is that the auction is well-designed such that it facilitates price discovery, but limits the damage of the winner’s curse experienced in Europe.
Significantly, a large chunk of this spectrum is coming in the 900 MHz range, which is going to be a global first for 3G services, traditionally deployed at much higher frequencies. The lower frequency range will be less expensive from aninfrastructure deployment perspective as the signal will travel further,which in

turn will imply fewer base stations (recall your high school Physics). This is another new and interesting phenomenon where lessons learned from Lab India’ will result in positive carry-over to other emerging markets. There are significant innovation externalities here and more work for chip designers, handset manufacturers, telecom engineers, mobile application developers, e-marketers, net-bankers and others of that tribe. Power be to them.

Moving Ahead
I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the issues raised here, at CITNE we have a passion for business intelligence using data mining, e-market design, and issues related to the impact of the open-source movement of programmers and firms. The ISB Insight reader will agree that there are enough new and interesting issues to keep everybody engaged meaningfully. The trick for us academics is to be wary of the trap my advisor, Alok Gupta (now Dept. Chair of Information Systems at the University of Minnesota) once found me in during my graduate school days. Having completed what I thought was an interesting proof for what I thought was an important theoretical problem, I duly sought his blessings. In typical fashion, he looked at me with a straight face and said, “Ravi, this is new and interesting!” This was followed by a brief silence, after which he said, “however, the interesting part is not new, and the new part is not interesting.”
We look forward to working with industry on problems that are relevant to them and rigorous for us.