Plenary 3: Rajaram Venkatraman
Institutionalizing Innovation – Challenges and Lessons from IT Services Industry
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Rajaram Venkatraman |
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Profile
Rajaram is a Principal Researcher and Innovation Architect with ‘Center of Innovation for Tomorrow’s Enterprise’ at Infosys Labs. His area of work focuses on enabling a culture of innovation within the organization. He has been with Infosys for more than 9 years and has nearly 25 years of experience in the IT industry. Internally at Infosys, he has been focusing on developing an innovation ecosystem harnessing the vast diversity of talent across business Units and functions and has been anchoring a vibrant innovation enthusiast community, has anchored an organization-wide Innovation challenge, has mentored several research projects around innovation and has been working on institutionalizing innovation through a unique pyramidal model. He has filed a patent on systematic innovation farming, and his papers have been accepted at International conferences on Innovation. His research focus also includes enabling CIO’s to become ‘Partners in Business Innovation’ through frameworks, accelerators, thought leadership thereby contributing towards sustainability and competitive advantage of their Organization. His team has conceptualized, developed and rolled out the central innovation platform that is being used across Infosys.
During his earlier stint in software services delivery for global clients at Infosys and other organizations, he has participated in several deal pursuits, has ramped up delivery teams, has conceptualized and built few software products/platforms, participated in Malcolm Baldrige Assessment preparations, played SEPG chairman role while embarking on CMMI assessments, has brought savings through six sigma methodologies etc. His previous stints include TCS, Computer Horizons Corporation, Lason India, NIIT Technologies, and XANSA.
Over the years, he has won many recognition including the annual Infosys Awards for excellence for ‘Account Management’. As a member of the Infosys Chennai Delivery Center management council, he has been an active resource person for many initiatives including ORION, STRAP-SURROUND, SPARK, Campus Connect, Instep, SNEHAM, REAP, KMRnR etc.
He also has been an active participant in various industry forums including CII & Anna University innovation culture event of 2013, inaugural keynote speaker in international conferences like ICRTiCA2013, NCISE2012 etc., SPICON-2011 (panel member in an innovation Institutionalization panel discussion), Judging panel member of CII-I3 regional innovation fair 2010, Guest speaker at IIT-DOMS function, Past Academic council member of a leading South based University, and Guest speaker at SPIN & PMI Forums.
Rajaram has a BE degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and an MBA from Open University Business School, UK.
Abstract
Innovation is often a niche area in many organizations and typically contributions and participation is heavily skewed towards the R&D and Marketing functions. While most organizations are designed for high performance in execution, they do not invest in building sufficient capabilities for innovation. In firms focused on services, the need for differentiation has become high due to competitive intensity as well as to capture new untapped markets/blue oceans for growth. Large customers also have needs around innovation and business transformation apart from the regular efficiency and operational needs. They also have a compelling need to move away from CAPEX to OPEX, want to be light on business process customization as well as prefer everything rendered as a service (Infrastructure, storage, Processing, Applications etc). It is not enough if vendors of IT services provide only efficiency and cost savings and not cater to business transformation and innovation. One cannot mature to a business partner relationship with customers without catering to their strategic needs. Also, there is a pressing need for the industry to come up with non-linear models which depend on IP, Outcomes, New product/ Platform/Service development etc. rather than the traditional Time and Material model which necessitates growth in employee numbers for every additional client requirement and hence is difficult to scale.
Hence, if an organization has to deliver value around innovation, it is not enough if only a few parts of an organization are innovating. The knowledge and capability to continually produce incremental innovations, sustaining innovations and even disruptive innovations are required to be embedded at all levels and at all client touch points for sustained excellence.
However, there are a number of challenges while institutionalizing innovation starting from Organizational silos with various business units & their agenda, specific competency building relating to innovation, time/bandwidth allocation from people, short term result expectation vs. long term orientation, harnessing the vast organizational diversity exiting within towards creating differentiation etc. In this talk I will cover some of these challenges and lessons learned while institutionalizing a scalable and sustainable innovation engagement model that has shown initial results and lead indicators towards building a culture of innovation within the enterprise.
