It is high time that the CTOs of Indian industries exploited their skills in proactively spotting opportunities in every volume-supported sector of the nation to innovate new solutions and products for the common man rather than to wait for a foreign brand to take the lead, urges Kalyan Vaidya, Managing Consultant, Valinnova Services, Singapore (http://bit.ly/F4TValinnova).
“A combination of irresistibility (such as Apple products), and affordability (such as Nirma powder) for the masses would establish the technology community of the nation as a saviour rather than just piggybacks on imported innovations,” he adds, during a recent interaction with Business Line .
As the old adage goes, ‘necessity is the mother of invention,’ reminds Kalyan. If we aren’t pushed to a corner in some form to survive or solve social and personal problems, we may either circumvent or learn to live with those, he reasons. “Innovation is one such that comes to our aid enabled by whole-brain thinking: right-brain imagination, artistry and intuition, plus left-brain logic and planning, under trying circumstances.”
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Kalyan bemoans, however, the fact that only a handful of individuals or organisations seem to deploy innovation as a natural tool to bring out the best in themselves or utilise lateral thinking skills, in a way to benefit mankind.
Excerpts from the interview:
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Let’s be mindful that once a reference is made to a CTO, it is generally concluded that we are talking about large corporates (with local or foreign origins) who only could afford such positions. Very few ‘medium’ or ‘small scale’ organisations may have such a title in their hierarchy.
But positions and titles aren’t our interest here. The essence of the role played by the departmental head of technology, engineering, R&D, design, development or their equivalents is what matters.
On localisation
Not to generalise, in the era of consumerisn with almost every international brand having its presence in the booming Indian market, many of their CTOs or their brethren may be busy with typical activities of importing specifications, designs and drawings or formulations of products of various ages to study and detail them out to either localise them through a network of suppliers developed within the nation’s borders and conserve forex or adapt them to suit local conditions of usage or modify them through carefully crafted value engineering initiatives in order to preserve the value, fit and function but reduce its costs and boost the business’ margins.
Some of these nuances of technologies abroad are precious acts to learn and to master. However, the best foot forward would be in applying the learnings to situations of specific needs/ interests within our society.
On customer-centricity
As the business world is seen to quote often times, everything starts with ‘customers’. The typical practice of Toyota to place their innovation and technology teams at the entrances and inside of Tokyo Disneyland to observe people’s moves, actions, challenges, etc. in order to design solutions through their products (cars), is a great example.
If our CTOs and their teams carefully observe and study the needs of the Indian populace in different walks of life and identify their day-to-day challenges, an array of innovative applications of technology may unravel. Right from the moment one wakes up to facing issues in water supply, power cuts, unsafe operations of vehicles/ equipment, parking woes, noisy and polluting constructions along roadways, unsafe traffic detours, often failing appliances at home/ office etc. These are only about the metros.
Moving onto tier 2 or tier 3 towns and then on to villages, the challenges faced by millions day in and out right from sanitation, lack of clean drinking water, poor educational infrastructure, primitive farming, harvesting, grain processing and cattle management techniques could all be quantified into crores of rupees of effort/ time expended and opportunities lost – cumulatively, in accomplishing routines and mundane tasks.
A little bit of mechanisation, simple automations with commonplace electronic devices, using contemporary materials, etc. which could only be enabled by a technology-savvy team would go a very long way in improving the lives of the masses. There sure is gold at the bottom of the pyramid for the right-minded CTOs. Just need to explore a bit.
A down to earth example is that of wheels and simple trolleys of world-class quality and variety for various ingenious applications in material handling to eliminate strenuous and unsafe practices. As marked by the ‘chakra’ in the Flag, they are signs of progress and more they are put to use in place of hard labour in domestic, commercial and industrial applications in every nook and corner of the nation, the more we demonstrate our innovation at the grass-root level!
On the India opportunity that the world is keenly watching
It won’t be a surprise if some Japanese are spotted in our rural geographies even before us sensing these deficiencies much faster and offering innovative solutions – a huge business proposition at their end considering the saturations faced by their businesses back home.
The Chinese are waking up to these opportunities as well and they could be even higher forces to reckon with than the Japanese; because many of these conditions are being faced currently by them and are being gradually eradicated – hence the technology-enabled solutions they generate at home could readily be mass produced for appeal in India.
If we look a little deeper into their prowess, they didn’t neglect toy-making as a primitive trade but moved up the value chain from there to using miniature electric motors, solenoids, IC chips etc. to currently ape much higher technology consumer items of the west with their wares!
Their applications of technology in various domains is at a rapid pace and given the volumes they handle globally, making them available to masses in rural India for any use must be a cakewalk for them!
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