Dr. Manish Gupta, Director – IBM Research, India asserts that innovations for the Indian market aren’t only about bringing down the price points
B&E: IBM has been driving a lot of R&D activity from India. What is your view on reverse innovation potential from this market?
Dr. Manish Gupta (MG): I am not parochial in this regard. I am not claiming that innovation will only happen here, it will happen in all parts. I feel that cost is just one aspect, and we in India often make the mistake of equating innovation with low cost. A lot of times, people talk about how can you bring down the cost. That’s only one form. In our work, we have seen several different drivers for ‘reverse innovation’. They can be related to the scale and price point, and they may simply be linked to different needs unique to the Indian market, which does not mean they are necessarily low cost. I prefer to use the term leapfrog innovation for this kind of innovation, where you have to rethink a solution, take a different approach to solving a problem, and then you can apply the same ideas to other markets.
B&E: What drivers do you see that will enable more of such innovation coming from India?
One driver is often scale, which many other people have pointed out. Often, the scale of what you see in a country like India and China is much higher as compared to the US. One example is what our own lab colleagues have done in the context of telecom accounts. As you know, IBM provides the entire IT infrastructure for telecom companies like Bharti Airtel and Vodafone. We deployed a solution in one of the telecom accounts in India I cannot name. We developed a first of a kind solution where instead of having different kinds of analytics applications working on their own copy, of what is call detail record data, we have brought in a streaming data solution. As the data gets generated, even when the data is new, different apps start their own processing. You have the data flow through different applications. While it was driven initially by scale & price point, it delivered some real business value, as the company can now access the same day’s data rather than the four days old data it accessed earlier. It has been pitched to the likes of AT&T, et al.
B&E: IBM has been driving a lot of R&D activity from India. What is your view on reverse innovation potential from this market?
Dr. Manish Gupta (MG): I am not parochial in this regard. I am not claiming that innovation will only happen here, it will happen in all parts. I feel that cost is just one aspect, and we in India often make the mistake of equating innovation with low cost. A lot of times, people talk about how can you bring down the cost. That’s only one form. In our work, we have seen several different drivers for ‘reverse innovation’. They can be related to the scale and price point, and they may simply be linked to different needs unique to the Indian market, which does not mean they are necessarily low cost. I prefer to use the term leapfrog innovation for this kind of innovation, where you have to rethink a solution, take a different approach to solving a problem, and then you can apply the same ideas to other markets.
B&E: What drivers do you see that will enable more of such innovation coming from India?
One driver is often scale, which many other people have pointed out. Often, the scale of what you see in a country like India and China is much higher as compared to the US. One example is what our own lab colleagues have done in the context of telecom accounts. As you know, IBM provides the entire IT infrastructure for telecom companies like Bharti Airtel and Vodafone. We deployed a solution in one of the telecom accounts in India I cannot name. We developed a first of a kind solution where instead of having different kinds of analytics applications working on their own copy, of what is call detail record data, we have brought in a streaming data solution. As the data gets generated, even when the data is new, different apps start their own processing. You have the data flow through different applications. While it was driven initially by scale & price point, it delivered some real business value, as the company can now access the same day’s data rather than the four days old data it accessed earlier. It has been pitched to the likes of AT&T, et al.
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