Views from Harvard

Four hours and four meetings in the Harvard Business School with
the best of the brains provided a lot of points to ponder and possibly some
solutions to the perpetual dilemma- what next for the successful knowledge
industry that now seeks new innovative approaches to climb the next mountain of
continuing profitability.

Professor David Garvin, one of the top ten rated faculty at HBS,
spoke passionately about the three horizon planning models that have enabled
many companies to explore new business opportunities, and ensure that a mature
company does not sacrifice innovation at the altar of standard dogma. Turning on
a switch to move from an organic management model to a mechanistic one and vice
versa, depending on the maturity of the business, is obviously a challenge for
even the most mature leadership teams, and David argues that any management team
in fast changing businesses must have the will and the ability to plan new
organization strategies and structures that are adaptive rather than rigid, to
charter a path through troubled waters.

Professor Michael Tushman, talks about the structural inertia
caused by size, the social inertia caused by the age of organizations who start
off being innovative but soon get comfortable with set patterns, particularly if
they have been very successful and the arrogance that is a natural outcome. Mike's
premise is that there is no need to create a new organization to house
innovation but, on the other hand, innovative groups must be housed within an
ambidextrous model of an organization to enable both the exploitative core of
the organization, and the exploratory innovation group to benefit from the
operating leverage of a common sales force and corporate oversight.

Finally, the celebrated Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, spoke to
us passionately of the need for organizations in emerging countries to address
the very real change management issues.

For us at Zensar, who have been very successful in the last
couple of years in building a highly innovative global delivery platform
strategy that embraces knowledge workers from over a dozen countries, albeit
with some investments not being productive as quickly as one would have hoped,
the three horizon planning and the ambidextrous organization model have been the
prime drivers of our story. But, in true humility, the humungous task of
organization-wide change is an area where neither we nor probably anybody else
can really claim full mastery.

Where can a full-blown implementation of a successful innovation
strategy really take any organization? For one, it enables costs to be reduced
and productivity to be improved by an order of magnitude that is not possible if
it's just a matter of whittling away costs incrementally. And, more important,
it provides new revenue sources by reaching out to new unserved markets because
of new geographical reach, new domain capabilities or new price points.
Professor Nitin Nohria, associate dean at HBS and the recent recipient of IIT
Bombay's Distinguished Alumnus Award, was excited when we spoke to him about
the possibilities for getting first time outsourcers to put their toes into
offshore outsourcing waters, and agreed that it's not just technology or
processes but the focus on getting closer to the customer that would see this
under-served segment come into the fore and realize its potential.

The 2006 focus of the Nasscom innovation Forum on Process and
Business Model Innovation in addition to Product Innovation clearly established
the use of an old cliché that "there is more than one way to skin a
cat". In a world where skinning costs is the most important focus area for
most firms, innovation is no longer a luxury but an imperative for sustained
success!

The author is deputy chairman & MD of Zensar and is chairman
of the Nasscom Innovation Forum for 2005—07. He can be reached at ganesh@cybermedia.co.in