adriankoh | idea stream

Singapore is at the global average, standing at just under 40 mins. That's pretty long, if you start counting the number of dependants over the three meals in a day.

Value starts to make sense when you corelate it with blood and sweat.

(I wonder if they adjusted for the indigenous prices of the Big Mac.)

How to Build a Culture of Innovation

India's Tata Group has made innovation part of its DNA, setting up a way for handling new ideas and making creative thinking a performance criterion

By Jessie Scanlon

It's not that there had been no innovation inside Tata Group, the 117-year-old Indian powerhouse responsible for that nation's first steel mill, power plant, and airline, among other achievements. But when India's long protected economy was opened in 1991, Chairman Ratan Tata decided that for his companies to survive and thrive in a global economy he had to make innovation a priority—and build it into the DNA of the Tata group so that every employee at every company might think and act like an innovator.

Today those 15 companies have produced such innovative products as the $2,000 Tata Nano car, and includes firms such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the Mumbai-based IT services and outsourcing power, which earned almost $6 billion in revenues in 2008.

The TCS Strategy

Cultural transformation is impossible without the leadership of top executives, so Tata created the Tata Group Innovation Forum (TGIF), a 12-member panel of senior Tata Group executives and some CEOs of the independently run companies. "TGIF's main objective is to inspire and share best practices" says Sunil Sinha, CEO of Tata Quality Management Services and a member of the forum. But executives also have employed other strategies to build a culture of innovation. Here's how they did so within TCS.

First, leaders approached the challenge both top down and bottom up. TCS Chief Technology Officer Ananth Krishnan says this involved establishing formal systems for encouraging innovative thinking and processing of ideas. "If I come up with an innovation, whether it's an incremental or a disruptive idea, I need to know whom to go to with it, and there needs to be an organizational process for moving it forward," says Krishnan.

TCS created multiple channels, and managers are trained how to direct an employee's idea: incremental innovations are handled and funded by the business unit in which the idea originated; platform-level innovations that might extend an existing offering are directed to one of the company's 19 global innovation labs, leading-edge research centers focused on specific technology areas or business sectors. Disruptive ideas tend to originate in the labs, but if one emerged from a business unit it would be directed to a lab or funded through an incubator fund run by the CTO's office. How all of the ideas are evaluated and funded is almost less important than the fact that TCS employees know ideas are welcome—and that good ones won't die in a pile on someone's desk.

TCS has also incorporated innovation into its formal annual review process, making it one of the nine categories on which employees are evaluated. If an employee wins the company's Young Innovator Award, he or she will see more than a salary bump. "It certainly accelerates your career track," says Krishnan. "I might pluck you up and put you in one of our innovation labs."

"Creative Dissatisfaction"

In addition to formal systems, TCS takes steps to stimulate innovative thinking. "We train people to think about improvement all of the time, to have what I call a culture of creative dissatisfaction with the status quo," says Krishnan. TCS has made innovation a component of training programs, from its leadership institute, to which 50 senior managers are sent every year, to its four-day "Technovator" workshop, at which its programmers are taught to think creatively.

Five hours of an employee's 45-hour week can be used for personal projects, such as learning a skill or developing an idea. To better capture nascent ideas, the company launched IdeaMax, a Digg-like social network that lets any employee submit, comment, and vote on ideas. Since it was launched last year, IdeaMax has collected 12,000 ideas, several hundred of which have become projects. "Every quarter, I review the top 10 most popular ideas," says Krishnan. "The wisdom of crowds works for us."

The company says it has been steadily meeting its innovation goals. Last year 10% of revenues were directly traceable to innovation activity, says Krishnan. TCS also has set goals for customer recognition of their innovations. "When we launched our innovation initiative three years ago, we said one third of customers must be able to recount an innovative element of their project," he says. "Now we've raised that to one half. Is that enough? I don't know. Maybe we should raise it again."

What can executives learn from TCS about building a culture of innovation?

Leadership Lays the Foundation

The CEO is the cornerstone of any effort to build a culture of innovation. He or she needs to communicate the importance of innovation directly to managers and to celebrate innovative efforts, including those that failed but were valiant attempts.

Hire the Right People. But…

In a targeted effort to build its capacity for breakthrough innovations, TCS hired more PhD graduates. But broadly speaking, the processes are as important as the people when it comes to building a culture of innovation.

Build Innovation Into the Organization

A culture of innovation won't take root if you don't have clear systems for approving and funding ideas, for example, or an employee review process that includes innovation criteria.

Use Social Media to Tap Ideas and Encourage Collaboration

In addition to IdeaMax, which will roll out to all Tata companies in September, TCS created Just Ask, a platform that allows employees to post and answer questions internally. Ten thousand questions were asked and answered within the first months of its launch.

Celebrate Innovators

In addition to the Tata Group-wide Innovista innovation competition, TCS runs its own Young Innovator Awards to reward and recognize successful innovators.

Jessie Scanlon is the senior writer for Innovation & Design at BusinessWeek, where she covers the intersection of design and business.

Aug

16

Develop A Business Plan and Change It Up On A Regular Basis

By Susan Gunelius

Post by Kristy Straka, contributing Women On Business writer

Most people in business believe that you should make a business plan and “stick to the plan”.  I disagree with this philosophy completely.  When you imagine your exciting new business most of you imagine it as a business that will be great   .   .   .    people will love it, and you will be successful.  That’s great because you have to believe in your business.

However, when you develop your business plan there are many facets to it.  Some of these are your limitations, barriers to entry, risks, and the question of who your competitor really is.

When I first developed our business plan for the Mobile Dental Lab on Wheels (DLOW), there were no other mobile labs anywhere in the industry.  Those you might see in the industry right now are those entrepreneurs who purchased their business from Vorofco, and we licensed them to develop their own brand so now there are more.

I was asked one day who my competitor was, and my response was “no one!”  Well that is an answer only a foolish person would have said.  In my mind I knew that there were no other mobile dental labs in the industry so therefore, I proudly listed my competitors as ‘none’ on my business plan and presented it to seasoned investors.

The fact of the matter is that I have plenty of competitors out there.  The traditional lab industry is a multi-billion dollar lab industry.  Yes it takes two to three weeks to get a crown back from the lab, but nevertheless, they are my competitor.  There are also dentists who own their own CAD/CAM units and will not use the mobile service, and there are labs that send their lab technicians into dental offices to work on a patient alongside the dentist.

Yes, I did have competitors!  I showed our business plan to many potential investors before someone stopped me dead in my tracks and gave me a reason to rethink my competitor analysis.  Once I did, I was able to come up with a sales presentation for potential clients that would one-up the competitor. Instead of telling dentists that I didn’t have any competitors, I told them who they were and why we were a better fit then I made the first revision to the business plan.

I was able to easily come up with ‘barriers to entry’ because this was an entirely new business industry and had never been done before, but scheduling was not one of the issues which turned out to be our main obstacle.

Could we maintain a schedule?  What if the dentist was running late?  What if the patient was running late?  What if we had back to back appointments and we couldn’t be late?  What if husband and wife booked back to back and cancelled at the last minute?  What if my best client had an emergency and needed the DLOW right away?  Scheduling was definitely a barrier to entry that I hadn’t given a great amount of thought too so I made the next business plan revision.

I could go on and on about how different your business plan will look in its developmental stages compared to what the business plan will look like six years later.  I can now answer ‘all’ of these questions without referring to the business plan because I now know the objections that I didn’t know in the beginning. I’ve lived the business, jumped the hurdles, and solved many issues over the past six years.

By writing down your risks and barriers to entry on your business plan, you can use this tool to solve issues.  You will eventually be able to eloquently speak well about the solutions you have developed to combat them both and you will sound like a professional because you will have lived your business.

Your business plan is your first marketing tool.  It makes you think!  It allows you to think past the excitement and the feel good feelings that you have about your proposed business.

You initial business plan should be reviewed and updated every time there is a change in your business ideas, your concept, marketing strategies, proposals, objections, and solutions, etc.  If you continue to make these changes, your business plan becomes your marketing manual, but once you think you have it all figured out, someone will come up with something new.

Being in business means to be ever changing and adapt to the changes that present themselves to you. The challenges you might face in financing your business or other obstacles may lead you to alternative solutions that you might not otherwise explore.  Be adaptable   .   .   .   start with the basic business plan, but continue to change it and revise your dates as you make your changes.

I believe that if your business plan ends up following the exact path that you have mapped out for your business then you have most likely missed critical opportunities which you might have otherwise embraced.

Remember that good old quote, "Plans are nothing, planning is everything." A continuous beta works with Google, and it'll work on your business plan.

The whole business of startups is getting interesting--first we have YCombinator's back-to-front VC funding, and now there's news Richard Branson is accepting "micropitches" via Twitter for new startup ideas.

It's all part of a new startup conference dubbed PerfectBusiness that the billionaire entrepreneur is helping to get going, and it's pretty simple. All you have to do is Tweet your business idea to @PerfectBusiness and add the hashtag #micropitch... which means your business idea has to be compressed down to just 111 characters to fit into the available space of a Tweet. Winners will get two tickets to the conference, airfare to L.A. included, and business coaching to turn the Tweet into a meaningful, complete company plan. There's even the chance Branson and team will choose your idea and get some VC funding on board.

If explaining yourself in a Tweet sounds impossible, or restrictive then remember this: "Brevity is the soul of wit." That's Polonius, in Hamlet, and it means an intelligent way to express oneself is to speak fewer well-chosen words rather than blather on endlessly. Call me Alan Sugar, if you will, but in relation to Branson's Twitter plan, if you haven't thought out your plan in detail so you can digest it down to a brief explanation then you probably don't have a potential business. Or you don't have the right thinking to make it happen. As far as PerfectBusiness is concerned, forcing you to explain a business idea in 111 characters really could reveal the megastar ideas--and it saves them a whole lot of time in reading lengthy pitches.

On the other hand, if that kind of Tweet pressure is too hard for you, then you can submit a longer pitch to the Perfect Business team via its Web site, but it'll cost you $60, whereas Tweeting is free.

[PeHub via TechFlash]

Twitter just keeps getting better and better.