Large Indian technology companies and MNC’s operating in India usually target clients with markets in developed economies. They seldom address local markets or innovate for them as they are client-driven, face resource constraints, and more importantly, carry a perception that domestic markets offer poor growth prospects and are not very profitable to address.

At the WCED, we believe that innovative solutions addressing the domestic market, and which are commercially viable or have high social impact can be developed if employees of these companies, with technical and solution development skills, are given a mandate and the freedom to do so.

Theoretically, organisational innovation has been difficult and research literature postulates many reasons. Some of the salient ones are:

• Companies usually seek ideas with huge potential impact causing ideas with perceived limited potential to be ignored
  
• Companies encourage only those ideas that fit into their current scheme of things causing many good ideas to fall by the wayside
  
• Employees are often reluctant to express their entrepreneurial ideas to companies for fear of failure

WCED, in association with TiE and a few technology leaders from the industry, has therefore created the Forum for Technology Innovations as a platform to unlock the potential, lying dormant in these companies, for developing solutions for domestic markets.

In an applied format, we approached companies and asked them to donate 100 man-days of their staff’s time for innovation. We found that more than 20 companies in Hyderabad were willing to participate. The model was, once the companies accepted to participate, to go and deliver to their staff a lecture on innovation, along with a pitch for them to develop, in a given time frame, an innovation concept note, either singly or in teams.

In the first phase, we worked with four companies and have received about 16 innovation concept notes. Dr Krishna Tanuku, Advisor and Mentor – WCED and the leader of the Forum, along with Dr Chandrasekar, met each of the teams, reviewed their concept note presentations, and provided feedback that would help them in the next phase of innovation modelling. Our goal is to challenge the selected innovators to convert their concept to:

a) A Prototype
b) A level where idea verification is possible
c) Or a level which has been agreed upon with the mentor

The findings from this initiative would be widely disseminated through papers and seminars.

For more information contact
wced@isb.edu