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Innovation:The emerging East to West model

Dr. Krishna Mikkilineni
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Dr. Krishna Mikkilineni
India is increasingly being looked towards for providing strategic innovation needed in serving not only the local consumers but also the global needs. Moving beyond supporting their global businesses, the Indian arm of MNCs are evolving as ‘centers of excellence’ for innovation and growth. More than 300 multinational corporations have set up R&D centers in India and many, if not all, of them help fuel the innovation driven products and solutions along with the Indian companies who also have realized the necessity of this to expand globally.

Earlier, products were designed for the developed markets in the West, given the consumption power that exists there and provided as it is or with some localization to the consumers across the developing world. Today this paradigm is no longer viable, given the consumption power and emergence of mid markets in the developing regions like India, China, the Middle East, and parts of Europe and Africa. The products, solutions, and services being designed in places like India are not only beginning to serve the needs of the local markets but also are increasingly bringing new alternatives to the markets in the West and as such they fuel the new innovation model of East to West and East to East.

Workforce development in an innovating organization
While India is emerging as a top global innovator for high-tech products and services, it is under performing with respect to its innovation potential, according to the World Bank report titled “Unleashing India’s Innovation”. Despite the abundance of young technical workforce, there are significant gaps in the innovation potential: Domain knowledge product or solution conceptualization, commercialization, and management experience being the main areas of opportunity to increase India’s innovation potential. Building these critical workforce capabilities and aligning the talent strategy with the business strategy will be the key enablers in systematically creating India’s innovation driven results, which can be showcased, to the entire world.

Broad-based competency development programs can help, but what we need are carefully designed and focused formal and informal learning, development and delivery methods that balance corporate initiated and the government sponsored programs with self-initiated development programs, all driven by the passion for learning by the workforce.

Workforce management

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