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Airtel, ICICI tops Innovation list
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 16 July 2008, 17:07 IST
New Delhi: In India, in terms of innovation, Bharti Airtel and ICICI occupies the top two positions, in the current survey of The Wall Street Journal Asia, with an undeniable impact on the consumer. However, the overall rankings for the most admired companies showed Infosys, Tata Consultancy and Wipro in the top three positions, with Airtel at the fourth position.
Being the best in satisfying the consumer needs, Bharti Airtel, integrated telecom company and ICICI, the country's largest private-sector bank by assets, has made a mark as the most innovative companies. The top ten list of the overall most admired and the top ten innovators amongst the 200 companies, have been published in The Wall Street Journal. The list enlisted Tata Steels in the fifth with Larsen & Turbo, ITC, Tata Motors, HDFC Bank and Mahindra & Mahindra following the route to the tenth position, respectively. However, it was Wipro, which moved to the third from fourth, while Infosys and Tata sticked to their respective postions. Bharti Airtel achieves its fourth position owing to its top innovation policies. For innovation, Infosys, TCS and HCL Technologies are also in the top five , followed by Anil Ambani-led Reliance Communications, Wipro, Satyam, M&M and Hindustan Lever (now called Hindustan Unilever).
The innovations like the complimentary card of ICICI which can facilitate air bookings, train-ticket bookings with lots of discounts and Airtel's inexpensive call rates, mobile, broadband, fixed-line and long-distance telephone packages to consumers and businesses and television over the Internet have indeed gained great response from the people in general. "The coverage of Airtel is very good, compared to other companies," remarked Yash Vardhan, a government employee. The product ideas are a mix of the the self generated ideas and the adopted ones like Bharti customized an idea from Korea, in which a phone owner can substitute music for the ringing sound, callers normally hear after dialing their numbers. Again, ICICI has brought out the system of fingerprint recognition in bank accounts, which helped the rural masses to a great extent.
The ranking was provided on the basis of the reader's ratings about companies on five attributes: innovation in responding to customer needs, corporate reputation, management's long-term vision, quality of products and services, and financial reputation. A total of 2,477 executives and professionals participated in the survey, which was conducted last year from May 11 to July 3. With a rough calculation of the Indian economy, which is seen to expand at a rate of nine percent, the country can become the world's fifth largest consumer market by 2025 from its present 12th rank.
