Nominations in product innovations by Indian companies are up. NASSCOM showcased these nominations out of 160 participants for the Nasscom Innovation Awards 2006.
It is imperative for the software industry in India to start focusing on products. India, as a market, is booming. This is a ripe opportunity for companies to tap into the potentials by creating products for Indian markets, which is what the nominated companies are working on. The unique combination of the population, budget, literacy and urbanisation across India requires indigenous products, they cannot be made elsewhere. Mobiles targetted this exact combination and have proved to be more successful than personal computers. Now, companies are trying to build on this market and provide products and services that are mobile based rather than just for computers. Madhur takes a look at some Indian companies that are active in the mobile domain. It will be really interesting to see how this space shapes up.
One thing I wholeheartedly agree with, is that smaller companies are more probable to innovate. Of course, there are exceptions, but bigger companies have many other aspects to look at, which smaller companies can afford to ignore. Smaller companies can innovate more simply because they can focus on that better. Though bigger companies can spend more, they usually expect a monetary benefit out of innovation exercises, and carry a heavy baggage of pre-established processes. Change faces lesser resistance in smaller companies. No change, no innovation! It is good that Indian companies are not venturing into it, I am going to keep a tab on the smaller companies to get updates.
December 22nd, 2006 at 12:51 am
Abhijit, this is right on.
This is how the ecosystem works. While big companies are busy making money, startups come up with innovations that have small markets to begin with, but eventually go on to become big. Specifically in the India context, I think that innovations that come out will be different from the rest of the world, because they will arise more from the specific constraints that we have.
December 22nd, 2006 at 11:41 am
I hope that this trend continues into developing a product-oriented software industry in India. By the way of services we are too dependent on external economies. Also, till recently the services industry was established so much that there was no much different happening there. Most of the companies did the same thing. In my opinion, this has resulted into a lack of innovation and original thinking in the Indian contingent. We need more of it.
March 6th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
[...] to solve local problems, by developing indigenous products for the Indian market. We are seeing slow developments here, but the money, and hence a lot of effort is still in the direction of serving other product [...]