India as an Innovation Hub

I was reading Navi Radjou's recent blog post on the HBR site on entitled "Is India an Innovation Giant... or Pygmy?". Given that I just got back from India last week, I had some thoughts that I wanted to share.

My company, Symphony Services, provides product engineering services for software, telecom and web-based companies, so innovation is critical. As expected, we have a significant segment of our delivery operations in India, so India's ability to act as an innovation partner is key to our success. That being said, I see a few issues that can impact India's ability to continue filling the cup: Hubris and Infrastructure.

1. Hubris: India, Inc. has to stop reading it's own press clippings. I've heard predictions that by 2025 India will own ALL product R&D and that US personnel at software companies will simply be sales and marketing functions. This has 2 implications for me. First that there is a discounting of the importance of contact with the end customer in creating innovation products and services. It's the same kind of "we know better than the market" that is the battle cry of most engineering organizations. I saw it when at Kyocera and the paraphrase Chip Heath of 'Make it Stick' fame, that's why your remote control has 53 buttons. Secondly, it presumes that the rest of the world is either standing still or will just 'get dumb' at the same time. Not happening. Lastly, it seems as if no one realizes that this kind of message will play very poorly with the same people that they want to sell to.

2. Infrastructure. Anyone who's been to India knows what I'm talking about. A 2 hour commute to go 10km is insane. And the prospect of adding thousands of more $2500 cars to the current state of affairs is just a bad idea. Look at the impact that the creation of the national highway system had on the US economy in the 60's. It allowed the population to spread out, create jobs through the construction and the resulting housing boom that followed as people could commute to city centers. And the ability to facilitate interstate commerce was a boon to all sectors of the economy. With a similar investment, the potential for the majority of the population to begin to reap some of the benefits of the ITO/BPO boom would create dramatic change in the economy and create more options for entrepreneurs to thrive, not just in the tech sector, but in all aspects of the economy. Infrastructure would grease the skids for the Indian economy and spur the creation of new companies and fortunes to battle the existing oligopoly that exists today.

Thoughts from Forrester B2B Marketing Workshop

A couple of weeks back I attended Forrester Research's B2B Marketing Workshop at their headquarters in Cambridge, MA. Overall it was a good review of some of their recent research, but very little in terms of helping make actionable improvements in how I do my day job. The folks at Forrester said that the details come at other events, but when someone puts the word "workshop" in the title of an event, I expect a little more. Maybe that's just me.

But it's not to say that the day wasn't without value. There was a few good exercises and examples of successful integrated marketing campaigns and SEO that was helpful and good ideas of what we could be doing.

A few days after the workshop, I had a meeting with Mike Gauthier of E-Tractions, a Boston area integrated marketing firm that also appeared on a panel at the Forrester event. As we were talking he asked me if I felt inspired by any of the ideas from the conference. I responded that I was torn between inspiration and depression. There were a lot of great ideas, but the realization that we're not doing near as many of them as we should was really depressing. Some of it was stuff that we didn't even contemplate doing, but a lot came down to not having the budget or internal resources to pull it off.

In any case, I'm going to do what we can, try to experiment and see what happens. Hopefully if we can show some good progress, we can "find" some more budget down the road.