India Inside: The Emerging Innovation Challenge to the West

Satish K. Nair (Institute of Management, Nirma University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India)

Journal of Product & Brand Management

ISSN: 1061-0421

Article publication date: 22 February 2013

324

Citation

Nair, S.K. (2013), "India Inside: The Emerging Innovation Challenge to the West", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 22 No. 1, pp. 95-97. https://doi.org/10.1108/10610421311298768

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


The book comes with quite a pedigree. The authors are Indians who have spent a significant portion of their academic, research and consulting career in the developed “west”, and who have also spent a long time studying India‐related business issues in their affiliation with the Aditya Birla India Centre at London Business School, where they are currently the co‐directors. Kumar figured 26th on “the 50 most influential management gurus” for 2011 published by www.thinkers50.com, and Puranam features in www.poetsandquants.com 2011 list of “the 40 best b‐school professors under the age of 40”.

Here is a book that “is the result of (1) more than fifty in‐depth face‐to‐face interviews with CEOs, scientists, engineers, policy makers, and industry observers; (2) analyses of data on more than three hundred projects from surveys and internal company records to learn how globally distributed work is managed; (3) textual analyses of nearly one thousand media articles; and (4) statistical analyses of more than three decades' worth of patent data associated with inventors in India” (p. 4). When such a level of thoroughness goes into the making of a book, the prescriptions that emerge from it can be expected to effectively address its stakeholders, including policy makers, businesses from both the developing and developed worlds, and consumers, apart from the academics, management scholars and consultants.

The book postulates that “India Inside” (the invisibility of innovations emanating from India) is a “current state […], not necessarily its steady state” (p. 12). Hence, a convincing argument is put forth in the very first chapter that it was “only a few decades ago that Japan and Korea were prematurely categorized as havens for low‐cost production, incapable of innovations” (p. 3). The 2010 BusinessWeek ranking of the most innovative companies in the world lists Toyota, LG Electronics, Sony, Samsung, Nintendo, and Hyundai within the top 22. The authors follow up this piece of information with a poser: “Is it really all that far‐fetched to imagine that the 2020 rankings could contain a significant number of Indian companies (beyond the Tata Group, already there at 17th) among the most innovative? Could ‘Made in India’ become synonymous with innovation?” (p. 4).

The invisibility of innovations of Indian origin to the end consumer is captured in an “innovation iceberg” (Fig. 1‐1, p. 9). This section effectively rebuts the notion that “Indians don't do innovation” (p. 4) and goes on to list four types of innovations originating from India, signaling its emergence as a global innovation hub. It is pertinent to list them here:

  1. 1.

    globally segmented innovation led primarily by major multinational corporations that have set up captive innovation and R&D centers in India;

  2. 2.

    outsourcing innovation to Indian firms where R&D services are provided on contract to support new product development for consumers in the developed world;

  3. 3.

    process innovation through an injection of intelligence by Indian firms; and

  4. 4.

    management innovation of the global delivery model to effectively bring global scale and cost efficiencies to previously locally clustered service processes (pp. 8‐11).

Chapters 2 to 5 elaborate on each of the innovations.

If Indian‐origin scientists, India‐based R&D units of MNCs and Indian companies are already providing these “invisible innovations” to consumers in the developed world, the situation at home is not all that different in terms of innovativeness of the man on the street. Kumar and Puranam contend that “creativity is more than desirable in India; it is an absolute necessity in a country that is capable of generating an enormous range of constraints – social, economic, and technological – on individual action. The practice of finding fixes, workarounds, and shortcuts is a way of life in India, so ubiquitous that it has even generated a colloquial sobriquet: jugaad, loosely translated as ‘making do’ or ‘improvization’” (p. 7).

(An interesting blog that celebrates such “grassroots enterprise” can be read at http://shekharkapur.com/blog/2010/07/a‐blackberry‐addict‐discovers‐grassroots‐enterprise‐in‐india/).

Having elaborated on the innovations serving the consumers in the developed world, Kumar and Puranam in chapter 6 take up the issue of frugal engineering – developing products for the budget‐constrained Indian consumer. The next chapter analyses several constraints that, the authors contend, are, at the very least, irritants, and, at the most, significant impediments to India's potential to become an important innovation engine of the world. The final chapter, on the future of Indian innovation, dwells on the threat from China in its observations and prescriptions to policy makers.

The book's prescriptive style is (more than) apparent in its use of a section titled “recommendations” at the end of each of chapters 2 to 7. The recommendations are targeted at three different stakeholders: MNCs, western policy makers, and Indian companies.

The book chooses to summarize its major findings for the three sets of readers in the very first chapter itself. With a provocative title, “Where are the Indian Googles, iPads, and Viagras?”, chapter 1 presents the afore‐mentioned “innovation iceberg”, summarizes each of the following chapters and then presents “an overview of the implications for western MNCs and policy makers […]” (p. 17). In effect, the time‐pressured practitioner out west can opt for extracting the learning by reading and understanding the implications of the emerging innovation challenge to the western MNCs in just 26 pages of easy paced matter. This style of presentation can be beneficial to the book and its intended readers since it allows for near‐complete understanding of the topic in the first chapter while cajoling the more interested ones to explore the sub‐topics of their choice in the ensuing ones. While the book assuages the western MNC manager against pressing the panic button yet, the emerging innovation challenges for him/her are identified thus: loss of requisite entry‐level experience of the knowledge workers (since these jobs get outsourced to emerging economies such as India); and adapting the internal organization in the face of the “eastward” shifts in the growth markets as well as the talent required to serve such markets. With the gauntlet thrown down in chapter 1 itself, the prudent MNC manager would be expected to explore deeper and study the implications of the four types of innovations covered in the ensuing chapters. Also, the western companies that are now looking to expand geographically can study frugal engineering as a strategic choice for competing successfully in the emerging markets.

This reviewer felt a bit disappointed on the section of “recommendations” in chapters 2 to 7. Maybe, it was the heightened level of expectation from the work. Some of the “recommendations” are nothing more than listing of obstacles and asking firms to be wary of them (pp. 46‐47). Some others read more like identification of opportunities (p. 147), rather than solutions or approaches to harness the opportunities that may be expected from a topic headlined “recommendations”. The opinion of this reviewer has to be read in conjunction with the stated intent of the authors at the beginning of the book: “[…] goal of the book is not to provide all the answers, but is to raise the important questions, […]” (p. 16), in which case, a more apt title such as “challenges and opportunities” may have sufficed.

In chapter 7 (“India's innovation challenge: overcoming institutional constraints”), Kumar and Puranam identify, what they call, three critical pillars of innovation that need to be strengthened, “although other elements are also important” (p. 127). There is no referencing or even a brief explanation regarding the choice of the three parameters – should this be taken as the authors' opinion? The lay reader may not be too worried about this, since the “informed” opinion comes from stalwarts. However, the academic‐researcher may wish for a more professional presentation. In the chapter, “BTech” and “MTech” are expanded as business technology and management technology (p. 135), while quoting a senior executive of Intel's R&D operations in India who was interviewed for the study. The quote mentions curriculum – so, there is a doubt as to whether the executive was actually referring to Bachelor of Technology and Master of Technology programs rather than the expansions provided. A clarification might be in order here.

Continuing on the topic of recommendations provided in each of chapters 2 to 7, this reviewer feels these could have been re‐iterated at the end as an appendix and an attempt made to develop a model on these recommendations that could aid the marketers and policy makers. Such a presentation might have added to the value of the book as a prescription for India as a preferred destination for global innovation.

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