Monday, May 11, 2015

INNOVATION SPECIAL ...........ART OF STAYING NIMBLE

ART OF STAYING NIMBLE


Goliaths sometimes need to act like Davids. Here's how tech giants are rekindling their entrepreneurial zeal

Every company begins as a startup ­ full of enthusiasm, bursting with ideas and entrepreneurial zeal. With growth comes the need to organ ise and professionally manage. Then come more managers, ironically, to manage managers. Layer upon layer is added till the organisation becomes a large Kafkaesque bureaucracy. In the end, the once nimble startup becomes a large, rigid corporate engine that maximises profits and minimises risk.
Can that process be reversed? Can large billion dollar companies turn back the clock and mimic what upstarts are doing? Can they create a culture of innovation that startups so specialise in fostering? Apparently, yes. That's exactly what a handful of tech companies are attempting in India. While some are building lean “two pizza teams“ to focus on innovation, others are actively seeking entrepreneurial ideas from their employees and stakeholders.
Intuit Two Pizzas Only
It may be a $4.5 billion financial and tax preparation software company, but Intuit pretty much relies on decisions by experiment rather than by Powerpoint, or bureaucracy. The India ops of the California-headquartered company has adopted what Intuit India VP & MD Nikhil Arora calls `lean experimentation'. Employees are urged to come up with a hypothesis through testing, and given six weeks to come up with results. “We're trying to encourage experiments faster,“ says Arora. Of course, nine out of ten experiments fail but like the other big tech firms, Arora “celebrates failure“ as the learning curve gets lengthened.
In fact, the size of each team too strictly mimics the startup pattern in what the company dubs the `2 pizza team'--it cannot be larger than 6-8 people, like startups in their incubation phase. With 1,000-odd employees in India, Intuit also throws in a `brainstorm' initiative in a casual environment, like a cafeteria, for employees to come up with ideas. These are then posted in-house for other employees to further debate or build. Finally, a leader challenges or sponsors the idea. The company has so far used 300 ideas via the Brainstorm sessions.
Moreover, the company regularly works and partners with startups. Two years ago, it even hosted an event, Intuit Super Angels, in which it engaged with a network of startups with employees mentoring and reverse mentoring the startup community. “We constantly learn from each other,“ says Arora. It surely fell into place last year when Intuit acquired the Jaipur-based KDK, a tax filing software startup, as Arora admittedly spent a lot of time with its founder.
NetApp Flat Out
Anil Valluri, President of NetApp India proudly declares that his company is a $6.3 billion startup with the founders still intact. Thanks largely to the flat structure within the organisation, NetApp has managed to remain nimble. The company has a three-layer hierarchy -global, regional and local -enabling the entire staff to have their ear to the ground.
Valluri doesn't have a cabin and neither does Tom Georgens, the global CEO. It allows for an open environment with people expressing ideas freely. For instance, in the `Brown Bag' sessions, people hold impromptu conversations to carve out ideas. Once these take root, teams of 15-20 people work on each project with the technical directors and senior managers going through the entire process of ideation to prototype and marketability. If ideas fail, team members owe up to the responsibility. “We must be able to admit on messing up, otherwise it leads to fear of failure.“ He adds that the intent is very important, and messing up with the wrong intent can have dire consequence
Cisco Fail Fast
With over $47 billion in revenues and 11,000 employees in India, the word nimble doesn't spring to mind when you think of Cisco. The company's leadership begs to differ. Cisco is focusing on building smaller, high-impact teams. Even on complex products, the company is trying to build nimble teams that are virtually self-sufficient: comprising developers, hardware engineers, software engineers, product managers, go-to market members and a customer representative. Amit Phadnis, President Engineering of Cisco India, believes it is ideal for such teams to scale up very fast, typically mirroring the first phase of a startup's growth trajectory.
A company the size of Cisco is bound to have large software and hardware teams. But recently, they've been merged into a single entity. The logic is to bring software engineers, the test guys and developers on a single platform while cracking a product. “It's all about how quickly such teams can be brought together,“ says Phadnis.
The idea is to create structures that allow people to fail fast. The company generates some 75-100 workable ideas every 4-6 months across the Cisco network worldwide. About 50-60% of them fail very early. The ones that remain are evaluated for the product phase in 3-6 months.
But perhaps what takes the cake is the concept of spin-ins, which basically empowers a team to such an extent that a separate company can take root outside of Cisco even though the latter pumps in all the resources. “Whenever there is a solid business case around a product, you need an environment where you want to develop the product line at a rapid pace unshackling it from the rest of the processes that exist in very large companies,“ says Phadnis.
Autodesk Inviting Partners
For the $2.5 billion Autodesk, the best way to seek out innovation and remain agile is through partnerships. “We look for innovation by incorporating our external environ ment,“ says Pradeep Nair, MD of Autodesk India. Autodesk is a global leader in 3D printing, a globally disruptive phenomenon helping consumers to do manufactur ing. The company has set up a `Spark' innovation fund last year with a $100 million kitty for startups to come up with breakthroughs in 3D printing, thereby acting as a venture capitalist. It's the same in partnering with universities and labs globally.
Autodesk has had a long partnership with the National Institute of Design to establish three Centers of Excellence for Innovative Design at its campuses in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Bangalore in India. These design labs are equipped with cutting-edge 3D design software from Autodesk. “We also work with institutions like Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology on knowledge sharing and facilitating connections with top institutions in US, like MIT,“ says Nair.
The idea of partnering with industry and academia has also been stretched to tech networks at large. Now the company has something called an Autodesk Lab, aligned to the office of the Chief Technology Officer. When the product development team within Autodesk comes up with an idea, the Autodesk Lab makes it available to the community at large. “The products evolve around a lot of user feedback and also weeds out those which may not have much traction,“ says Nair.
Tata Communications Curious Case
In 2013, Tata Communications launched its `Shape the Future' initiative, wherein employees were encouraged to take risks. The program invited people to submit ideas that have the potential to become a $200-million business within ten years and touch 200 million people; select the best ones, and then coach the teams set up to imple ment them.
Again, in early 2014, Tata Communications launched an initiative for fostering innovation and futuristic thinking called `Moonwalk'. Five teams were assigned five different subjects (unrelated to the company) and asked to explore each of them. “It encourages intellectual curiosity,“ says Julie Woods-Moss, CMO & CEO of NextGen Business, Tata Communications.
Apart from fostering a culture of innovation akin to startups, Woods-Moss is open to innovations happening outside the company. A hackathon is held every year with a prize purse of $50,000 thrown open to external candidates. “The winning team can come and work for us for 90 days but we will have the right to take it (in novation) to the market,“ she says. “Startups learn from our product managers and we learn from them.“
Interestingly, the flat structure of the company enables fast decision-making, which has resulted in something called `virtual board' that meets every Friday. The job of this body is to approve capital for funding of ideas. “Elsewhere, capital boards meet in three months and it gets stressful as projects get delayed,“ says Woods-Moss. CD
By Moinak Mitra

CDET1MAY15

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