On The Innovation Highway

A year ago, in a video conference with the delegates of the

Nasscom 2005 conference, President Dr Abdul Kalam had exhorted the industry

leaders to think big and set the industry on the path of innovation to achieve

greater heights. This February, Nasscom 2006 established the validity of his

suggestion as an industry, energized by the quest for innovation, demonstrated

that it is surely on a fast track to value creation. And perhaps the best

validation of this path was the President's willingness to give away the

Awards of the Nasscom Innovation Forum to a carefully selected group of eight

small, medium, and large companies at the conference.

What is it that makes small companies such as Ocimum and

Skelta deserve the right to stand on the same platform as TCS and Wipro and bask

in the glory of recognition? It is their ability to dream a new dream and attain

some measure of success in their ventures. If TCS demonstrated that its foray

into biosciences with a battery of Phds has begun to yield commercial results,

young Anuradha Acharya of Ocimum showed how the same path of marrying biology

and technology can be traveled with success if there is a well thought out

vision and strategy, fueled by entrepreneurial energy. And if Wipro has

demonstrated through its successful foray into remote infrastructure management

in its global command center that even large companies can develop the

ambidexterity required to manage the science of exploitation and the art of

exploration simultaneously. Sanjay Shah of Skelta has demonstrated that a

focused tools based approach in a niche area like business process management

can yield rich dividends for a small company.

Two famous authors and speakers made this, a conference to

remember. Prof W Chan Kim of Insead delivered a great lecture on the virtue of

looking at Blue Ocean strategies in relatively greenfield areas rather than

rushing into the highly competitive Red Ocean. And the irrepressible Tom

Friedman, multiple Pullitzer Prize winner, and New York Times columnist and the

man who discovered that the world is flat, delighted the audience with his

erudite presentation of the flattening forces and his robust support for the

offshore outsourcing movement.

He also repeated the warning about China's focus being

much stronger in the area of higher education than India and counseled the

industry to move from answering the how question to focus on the why, which

would automatically move the discussion from cost reduction to value creation.

And delivering yet another quotable quote, he cautioned India to become a

stakeholder in the free world rather than a free rider.

What makes the Nasscom conference the melting pot of a

global IT community-this year there were hundreds of delegates in every

country from multiple countries actively participating in every discussion and

making the engagement process extraordinarily lively. And the speakers ranged

from the CEOs of the Big Four Indian IT firms to modern day celebrities of the

calibre of Vivek Paul and Pramod Haque, the latter a worthy recipient of one of

the Global Excellence Awards presented at the conference. The width and depth of

topic coverage, the level of professionalism that the Nasscom team brings to

every edition of the event and last, but certainly not the least, the enormous

networking opportunity-all this and more is what keeps the IT community

flocking from every corner of the country and the world to the industry's

biggest extravaganza!

Finally, the President's speech was the icing on the cake

of an excellent Nasscom conference and true to his track record, he came up with

one more target for the Indian IT sector-to achieve 200 bn dollars of exports

and presented a very lucid set of arguments and ideas to support his hypothesis.

With two articulate and intellectual Presidents showing the way-Dr Kalam for

the country and Kiran Karnik for Nasscom and the seeds of innovation now planted

across all sectors, maybe this goal also will prove to be reachable for Indian

IT and BPO companies.