Innomantra's Patent Portfolio of Major Indian IT Companies

My partner firm Innomantra Consulting, which specializes in Innovation consulting, has come out with a first ever report on Patent Portfolio of Major Indian IT companies and the report has been quoted in the media.

It talks about the role patents are playing in driving Innovation in Indian IT industry. It also analyses how the major IT companies are performing wrt each other on their patent portfolio and tracks their R&D spends.

There is also a discussion on challenge of filing software related patents and how the IT companies are dealing with it. The report CD comes with a list of patents documents in a bundle.

To get this report, you can get in touch with me or write to the company directly.

Travel and Innovation

Paul Sloane in his recent newsletter says "Recently I visited the beautiful city of Antwerp and while there I filled my car at a fully automated petrol station.  There was no attendant and no shop.  You just put your credit card into the machine and then fill up.  It reminded me of two innovation lessons.  You can always get innovative ideas by traveling because people in other countries solve problems in different ways.  Secondly a good way to innovate is by eliminating things - in this case the attendant and the shop."

Now what this small note tells me is that traveling to a new place can fuel your innovation quotient. You can pick up ideas from the way people in this country live and deal with the inherent problems that they have in their system. For example visitors to India can pick up a tip or two on Jugaad. The moment you are in an environment other than you live in, you start seeing the things that are obviously different from your own. It reminds me that a few years back I was traveling in Bhutan and I realized there not many shops selling clothes or garments. In fact the small number of shops that did have clothes were not the clothes common people were wearing there and were obviously meant for the high end visitors. Upon enquiry I figured out that most people there weave their own clothes, which may seem very primitive to most of us, but it is the way of life there. Now you never know when this brainwave strikes someone and they make this idea of weaving your own cloth popular and it may become a fashion statement to wear self woven clothes. 

Secondly, the difference between how you operate and how they operate can give you the models or small tricks to use while doing a formal idea generation, like the author picked up the idea of elimination which can be and is used popularly in product designs. 

On a lighter note, this tells is that a true professional will always find his subject's angle no matter he or she is, working or on vacation.

Middle Management & Innovation

Paul Sloane in his article "Who is Crushing Creativity in your office?" puts the onus of driving innovation on the leadership of the organization. While it is true that unless there is leadership will in innovation or rather any initiative, it is very difficult for it to be successful, my experience says the work needs to be done on the middle management layer to drive it across the organization.

The lower layers in the organization pyramid are usually young and hence nimble and not rigid. They also do not have the decision making in their hands, and have the mandate to work on what is assigned. Now this assignment can well be on coming out with new ways of doing things. Given a task, and some broad enabling infrastructure, they will give you the best they can.

Senior management has the birds's eye view of the organization and they understand the need to innovate to survive in the marketplace. They may or may not know the 'How' part of Innovation, but they understand the 'Why' of it. And with this understanding they usually launch the fancy innovation initiatives in the organization. 

Given the perspective of above two layers, the actual responsibility of making innovation happen lies on the shoulders of middle management. They have to figure out the 'How' of innovation and then put in a process to make it happen. The important point is that more often than not, they have to do this while managing the regular operational business responsibilities. Given our productivity drives using all possible management methods and models, all middle managers often have more on their plates than they can chew. Lost on operations, they either ignore these initiatives or at least put them on a low priority. The importance of initiative never tickles downs to the layers below them, and this is where the initiatives die. 

Leaders need to enable this layer to not become the bottleneck in the innovation drives, by picking up the  set of people who believe in these initiatives and have the inherent drive to run with them. Leaders need to provide these frontrunners a very solid support for them to be able to bring in the expected changes in the organization.

Innovation : An experiment

Organizations tend to look at Innovation as a process that is based on a theory which in turn in based on experiments done elsewhere in different environments. And what they expect at the end of it is a well defined result which can be in terms of a business benefit, generating a better top line or bottom line.

I think Innovation needs to be treated as an experiment or a series of experiment, that are done in  well defined boundaries and are conducted freely within these broad boundaries. An experiment lets you play on the go. It does not have to follow the set process to the T, rather it improvises as it goes and has a better probability of both leveraging creativity and delivering better suited results for the business.

Over the last 100 years or so since the time management was born and adopted as a discipline, our minds have been so well tuned to the process, that no sooner we want to do something, the first thing that we do is put in a process in place. Experiment with your creativity at the cost of processes and you may be amazed at the results.