TECH SPECIAL ..................... A GUIDE FOR BEST GRAPHIC CARDS

A GUIDE  FOR BEST GRAPHIC CARDS  We list out some of the best graphic cards that will fit in almost any budget While most computers come with in built graphics, it's always better to invest in a graphic card to take the load off your expensive CPU. Supercharging your computer with a graphic card not enables you to game, but also helps with work.Adobe products run faster, enabling you to design or edit videos.Here's a graphic card for every budget, and every format. Note: A lot of these prices dip over time, so you may get some of these cards for cheaper if you're lucky and look for deals. SUPER BUDGET CARDS (Less than Rs 6,000) Great for casual gaming as well as doing a bit of graphic  work.Don't expect wonders though. AMD HD 5450 Starts at Rs 1,800 onwards and comes in 1 GB and 2GB VRAM variants. With a small enough profile to fit on a small home theatre PC (HTPC). This is the absolute base card you can go in for. NVIDIA GEFORCE GT 730 Budget Nvidia Geforce cards range from 210's to 610's and 620 model numbers. However, there are certain brands which sell the GT 730 from the newer 7 series Nvidia cards for a little less than Rs 5,000. u Lower end o ones offer 1GB of RAM but for a few hundreds more, you can get 2GB, and quite a lot more power than base cards. As well as 4K support. AMD R7 240 Like the GT730 above, you can get a lower end card from AMD's new R7 line of graphic cards for well under Rs 5000. Slightly less powerful than the GT 730, but both great options. Not to mention, you can run Battlefield 4 in a decent resolution. At this price you will get a 1GB variant, however, for a bit more you can score 2GB VRAM. BUDGET AND HTPC CARDS (Rs 6,000 ­ 12,000) Can run most games very well at 1080p or lower. Best for those who play a lot of Massively Multiplayer Online RPG's and online games.As well as those who want some thing small yet potent in their HTPC's. Capable of 4k. NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 750 TI You can get the 750 variant for a little less than Rs 9,000. However, the Ti is the higher powered variant you can go in for about Rs 11,000. With it's very low power consumption, small footprint and excellent performance, this is the perfect fit for your gaming machine or to pop into your HTPC platform.Comes with 2GB VRAM, the 750 Ti can power your games at 1080p easily, though not at Ultra settings. AMD R7260X Almost neck to neck with the 750, the R7260X retails for between Rs 8,000 and Rs 96,00.Also capable of decent 1080p gaming, with 2GB of VRAM, the R7260X is a decent card at a decent size and it performs better than the 750, though not as good as the 750 Ti. MID RANGE (Rs 12,000 ­ 25,000) Can run most games very well at 1080p or lower. Best for those who play a lot of Massively Multiplayer Online RPG's and online games. As well as those who want something small yet potent in their HTPC's. Capable of 4k. From this point on you will need a 500Watt+ power supply. NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 960 Recently released the 960 starts at about Rs 17,000 and for a bit more you can get a higher powered OC edition. This card straddles the fine line between power and price, with multi monitor as well as 4k support. You can play all the latest games easily at 1080p and many of them at Ultra, though a few newer ones you may have to scale down a bit. The 960 comes with 2GB of RAM. If your budget is more than Rs 20,000, you should look at an OC edition. AMD R9 285 For about Rs 20,000+, you can get the, brand new AMD R9285, with 2GB of RAM, as well as a host of features like 4k connectivity and TrueAudio which takes the audio processing tasks of the CPU. A bit more expensive than  the GTX 960, it's a little lower powered than the OC editions of the 960. However, it is a good card nonetheless. ENTHUSIAST (Rs 25,000 ­ 35,000) This is now high end gaming territory. For those who love their games, and want the best out of them. Not only that using a feature called Dynamic Super Resolutions (DSR), you can run 4k games on a 1080p Full HD display. NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 970 Using the new Maxwell architecture, the GTX 970 is the perfect buy those those gaming enthusiasts who want power for their price. With a wholesome 4GB of RAM stuffed into it, the 970 is blazing fast and can run all games settings all turned up to Ultra. With 4k support, the 970 can also game easily at upto 2k resolu tions using DSR, n a 1080p moni. Which adds a visual fidelity to games. With multi monitor upport the GTX 970 just hits all he right gaming buttons. PROSUMERHARDCORE GAMER (Rs 35,000+) No compromises, just power all through. These cards are for the hardcore gamers, who prefer quality above everything else.Also for those who want to balance their high end gaming with adequate power to so high end video editing and 3D work. NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 980 This is top of the line and yet affordable for some. Starting at Rs 46,000, the 980 is packing some serious power. With 4GB of RAM and 2048 CUDA processor cores packed in, this card can handle anything thrown at it, turning everything up to the highest setting. It will not break a sweat even running games at 2k using the DSR. HIGH END LUXURY (Rs 85,000) The Lamborghini of display cards. NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX TITAN X If price was no bar and you wanted the best, then look no further than the GTX Titan X. A beautiful card that comes packaged in a sleek metal body, the Titan X is the ultimate in luxury gaming.You will almost feel bad for hiding it inside your PC, instead of displaying it on your wall. With a whopping 12 GB of RAM, and 50 per cent faster than the 980, this is the absolute edge of cutting edge tech.

Andre Rodrigues  PM 23APR15

BUSINESS AND FUTURE SPECIAL ..................Business and society in the coming decades

Business and society in the coming decades

In the long term, corporate and societal interests converge. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon and SVP of sustainability Kathleen McLaughlin argue companies have an opportunity to use their scale and expertise to reshape global systems and mitigate complex problems.

Business exists to serve society.

Over the past several decades, one of the great discussions within capitalism has centered on defining exactly what a business is and what its obligations are to society at large and to the many stakeholders participating in business systems, including customers, shareholders, employees, suppliers, and communities, to name a few.

The obligations to society have been defined in different ways at different points. For many retailers, including Walmart founder Sam Walton, the focus has been first and foremost on serving the customer. For others over the past couple of decades, the focus was myopically on the shareholder. With the advent of shared-value, double-bottom-line, triple-bottom-line, and related movements, we have seen a broadening of the discussion to recognize the importance of multiple stakeholders and the need to promote social, environmental, and financial value.

Long-term capitalism goes one step further, asking companies to actively reshape the systems in which they operate. Those systems could include the complex of logistical and shipping services that move goods around the globe, the web of overseas contract manufacturers on which companies rely, or the array of energy suppliers that fuel worldwide operations. Long-term capitalism takes a deeper view of business’s role in society, recognizing that, in the long run, the interests of stakeholders converge with the interests of the broader community. The actions of any one company may reverberate throughout the various systems in which it operates, generating second- and third-order benefits as well as negative externalities. Under long-term capitalism, companies recognize that fact and, through concerted action with others of sufficient scale, work to ensure constant improvements to those systems.

There are compelling reasons companies should seize the initiative to drive social and business benefits. First, in an interconnected world facing unprecedented environmental and social challenges, society will demand it. Increasingly, a basic expectation among customers, governments, and communities will be that the companies they do business with provide a significant net positive return for society at large, not just for investors. This will be a part of the implicit contract or license to operate.

Second, adding these other forms of positive return and improving systems will make the business more sustainable in the long term. Every company should be able to contribute value to society through its core businesses. By collaborating with other members of their networks and pursuing initiatives that draw on their particular capabilities, they can make society stronger in ways that also fortify their business. There is generally ample scope to do this, even for companies facing near-term earnings pressure, because the overlap between short-term, close-in interests and longer-term, societal interests is almost always large.

The basics: Add value for society as well as business

When it comes to serving society, a company’s first task is to ensure that its core business is fundamentally value creating—not just for shareholders but also for customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and the environment.

This stakeholder-value principle may seem obvious, especially given the extent to which triple-bottom-line thinking has seeped into mainstream business discourse. Yet financial short-termism still drives day-to-day decision making for much of the corporate world. For many, shareholder value creation remains the driving force of business initiatives; creating value for stakeholders becomes a by-product or a means to an end. Even when faced with reputational challenges, companies sometimes launch social initiatives as side projects only tenuously linked to the core business, rather than strengthening and articulating the ways in which the core business adds value to society.

Taking a more expansive view of serving society means first ensuring the core business delivers value to the broader set of stakeholders. Is it adding value to the local community, for example, through taxes and engagement with local organizations? It also means addressing externalities related to the core business.

At Walmart, that includes trying to minimize the environmental footprint of our operations. Between 2010 and the end of 2013, we reduced our energy consumed per square foot by 7 percent, and we now source 24 percent of our global electricity needs from renewable sources—progress toward our long-term goal of 100 percent. By the end of 2014, we were diverting more than 81 percent of our waste in the United States from landfills through recycling and reuse, on our way to our goal of generating zero waste.

Go beyond the core to change the system

While it is important to operate the core business in a way that delivers value for society and the business, a healthy, high-performing company can and must go further. The world faces social, environmental, and financial challenges of unprecedented magnitude and complexity. No one actor can resolve these issues single-handedly. Governments and civil society are increasingly calling business to the table.

Meanwhile, globalization and technology have heightened interdependence in our social, environmental, and financial systems. Even seemingly small actions can have serious consequences for others far away in space and time. Globalization and technology have also greatly increased transparency. Actions and their consequences, however far removed, are much more visible to all.

These forces have increased the opportunities—and the responsibilities—of business. If in the past 20 years the discussion has been about the need for business to serve stakeholders beyond just the customer and the shareholder, the next 20 years will be about the need for companies to improve the networks and systems they depend on. Leading businesses are actively using their scale and their particular assets to accelerate progress on tough social and environmental issues.

So, how can companies define their unique contribution to making society stronger? At Walmart, we use five screens.

1. Prioritize issues that are relevant to the company mission

Like most companies, we look for those issues that sit at the convergence of our business interests and the interests of society. For example, as the world’s largest grocer, we believe the sustainability of the world’s food supply is one of the areas in which we can make a significant contribution.

The United Nations projects that food production must increase by roughly 70 percent to feed the estimated nine billion people who will inhabit the planet by 2050. We will need to meet that challenge in a way that is sustainable for the environment and equitable for consumers and farmers (who make up two-thirds of the population in emerging markets). Our goal is to make the food system safer, more transparent, healthier, and more accessible—and to lower the “true cost” of food for the environment as well as customers and farmers.

2. Draw on the company’s particular capabilities

Even in purely philanthropic areas, companies can have greater impact by drawing on their unique business capabilities and applying those skills to complex societal problems. In our own efforts, we try to add value in ways that are different from—and ideally additive to—what others can do.

For example, to address hunger in the United States, we make use of our particular assets. Over the past several years, we have donated nearly 1.5 billion pounds of food to food banks across the United States, including an increasing amount of fresh food nearing the end of its shelf life. This improves nutrition among those most in need, while reducing the amount of food we send to landfills as waste. We also donated more than 180 trucks and refrigerated trucks, as well as time and expertise in logistics (since this is an area we understand well), to help strengthen the country’s charitable cold chain.

3. Aim for a triple bottom line

In tackling priority issues, we design our initiatives to promote benefits for society as well as business. We set ambitious targets, and we track progress rigorously.

In food sourcing, for example, we pursue initiatives that lower the environmental and financial cost of food production. One of these initiatives, agriculture optimization, aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by eight million metric tons across ten million acres of row crops such as oats and rice by 2020. Similar initiatives in the food chain and our own operations have allowed us to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions by approximately 18 million metric tons since 2010. To do so, we are working with the Environmental Defense Fund, as well as other large food companies, including Cargill and General Mills, to adjust the use of fertilizer and other inputs. We measure progress by tracking improvements in greenhouse-gas emissions, water, yields, and other critical factors per ton of food produced, by supplier and by category.

Such initiatives provide classic triple-bottom-line results. Besides the important reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, they helped us to cut the price of fruits and vegetables in the United States by a total of $3.5 billion through 2012 and 2013, offering important benefits for our customers and improving the world’s food supply.

4. Reshape the system for lasting improvement

In the era of long-term capitalism, companies can and must go beyond the kinds of improvements described above. They can do this by harnessing their expertise and scale and by joining with other organizations to reshape global systems for lasting improvement.

The global food system is essential to our business. For it and for us to succeed, the system must evolve in a way that is sustainable for the environment and smallholder farmers around the world; the system also must be high-enough yielding to feed a growing world population. Walmart is working to enable that evolution. For more than a decade, we have been collaborating with the US Agency for International Development to improve the lives of smallholder farmers and women in the agriculture supply chain. Through our direct farm initiative in Central America, USAID and its implementing agencies have provided agricultural expertise, training, and capital for infrastructure to smallholder farmers, preparing them to sell into the organized retail sector. Walmart provides specifications based on consumer preferences, guidance on timing for different crops and varieties, and regular purchase orders for offtake of farm production. Smallholders gain a better price and more stable income, as well as the skills to improve yields and profitability. Local customers gain a wider variety of better-tasting fruits and vegetables at the time of year when they want to buy. The agriculture sector gains productivity and becomes more viable. In Argentina, for example, more than two-thirds of our fruit and vegetable supply now comes from such direct-farm programs. In our U.S. private-label supply chain alone, we depend upon roughly $4 billion per year in agricultural products from small and midsize farmers.

Now we are exploring opportunities to collaborate with others to strengthen transportation and processing infrastructure in emerging markets. This will help develop local economies, feed local populations, and support local farming families, all while providing a secure supply of high-quality food products for Walmart customers.

5. Engage partners in transforming systems

To achieve lasting solutions to complex social and environmental challenges, we have learned that it is essential to engage and collaborate with other leaders of the systems we seek to strengthen.

The difficult challenges facing the world today are well beyond the scope of any single player to address. Solutions will depend on cooperation among leading organizations in all sectors.

To achieve the magnitude of change the United Nations, World Wildlife Fund, Climate Disclosure Project and others have called for in food, such as a reduction in water usage, a 3 percent annual decrease in private-sector greenhouse-gas emissions, and a 15 percent increase in yield in the next ten years, leaders of the food system must take concerted, coordinated action. In recent years, there has been an explosion in the number of multistakeholder collaborations in the food system, including the Consumer Goods Forum, which aligns retailers and manufacturers in achieving global food commitments such as sourcing 100 percent sustainable palm oil and soy; the World Economic Forum, with its Grow Africa and related initiatives; USAID’s Global Development Lab, to harness the power of the private sector and others in addressing development challenges; and the Clinton Global Initiative, with its innovative approach to sparking collaborative commitments from corporations, to name just a few.

Embed the values in the business

The commitment to address social and environmental issues should be a “whole company” undertaking, woven into day-to-day business activities; it’s not just a matter of corporate philanthropy.

Many companies, including Walmart, develop social and environmental priorities as part of annual business-planning efforts. We have made bold, public commitments—for example, to help train one million farmers by 2015 and to source 100 percent sustainable palm oil by 2015. These commitments focus our efforts and force innovation. Many of these commitments are made jointly with suppliers and our partners at nongovernmental organizations.

Leaders in the company, including the heads of business units and functions, set the social and environmental agenda for their respective parts of the operation. They set targets and cascade those down the line into the individual performance evaluations and business reviews of their team members. The capital-planning process explicitly addresses the social and environmental agenda.

In the long term, a company’s business interests and the interests of society converge. Companies, communities, individuals, and governments: we are all interdependent. Every healthy, high-performing company has an obligation to use its strengths to help society, and each can do so in ways that enhance the viability of the business, too. From how products are grown and made to how they’re transported and sold, companies can pursue innovative new methods and processes that provide lasting benefits to their stakeholders and to the communities in which they operate. Large-scale change does not happen overnight, but the stakes and potential benefits are immense.

By Kathleen McLaughlin and Doug McMillon

This essay is from Perspectives on the Long Term: Building a Stronger Foundation for Tomorrow, a book published by Focusing Capital on the Long Term. For more information about FCLT, an initiative cofounded by McKinsey & Company and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, visit the FCLT website.

E COMMERCE SPECIAL .................RACING TO DELIVER

RACING TO DELIVER  In India's hottest ecommerce segment--on-demand delivery-a slew of startups are bagging tonnes of money as they challenge the established models of larger and older companies, Albinder Dhindsa and Saurabh Kumar were bouncing off business ideas two years ago when they observed how while ecommerce had transformed India's retail sector for electronics and apparel, grocery was a different ball game ­ customers made repeat purchases every week, and yet only a few online players were able to crack the segment. “The experience of a customer buying a lot of groceries online is not that great,“ said Dhindsa, 32, former head of international operations at Zomato who cofounded online grocery delivery startup Grofers along with Kumar at the end of 2013. “If we standardized (grocery sales), it would really disrupt the way local retail is done right now.“ Dhindsa and Kumar had been colleagues previously at another company. Fast forward to 2015, when Grofers and its peers PepperTap, ZopNow and LocalBanya have raised hundreds of crore in what has become India's hottest ecommerce segment. These startups run on a simple model: They deliver from neighbourhood stores for a fee and do not own any inventory, posing a serious challenge to pioneering Internet grocer BigBasket, which sources and maintains its own inventory. Groceries and household staples represent the last challenge to bringing India's retail sector online ­ a $338 billion industry that makes up 69% of India's retail wallet and which has established supply chains that are particularly difficult to disrupt. Delivering food and other perishables at scale is fraught with difficulties and is capitalintensive. Stock-keeping units, or product lines, figure in the tens of thousands, and have special requirements for storage and delivery. Such hurdles exist even for the new wave of online grocers, who pursue a hyper-local strategy through tie-ups with local grocers and promise to deliver within an hour or two. “You have to set up the right kind of infrastructure for cold chain products and fresh produce, which are temperature-sensitive. You also have to get across enough range and rates to make sure you can deliver all the products to consumers,“ said Karan Mehrotra, cofounder and chief executive of two-year-old LocalBanya, which sources from local grocers and packs the goods in a central facility for dispatch. Bengaluru-based BigBasket, founded in 2011, has had a stronghold on the online grocery segment with a warehouse-based model that guarantees control over customer experience and allows for a nearperfect fillrate, a measure of how effective it is in fulfilling orders. “Single point stocking helps control shrinkage and write-off, and direct buying helps us with advertising income,“ said Hari Menon, cofounder and CEO of BigBasket, who previously cofounded Indian ecommerce pioneer Fabmall. Even so, BigBasket, too, is buying into the hyperlocal strategy. Recently, the company announced partnerships with 1,800 neighbourhood stores across the country to deliver goods in under an hour.The stores double as pick-up points for customers. “Customers buy most of their monthly needs in the beginning of every month, followed by `top-ups' through the month. It is very unlikely that this behaviour is going to change, unless you throw money at it,“ Menon said. While BigBasket is still far ahead of the pack ­ it receives more than 10,000 orders a day, compared with an average 1,000 or fewer for its younger rivals ­ the valuations of new-age grocers have soared disproportionately. Grofers' valuation tripled to about `728 crore in six months; BigBasket is valued at `1,519 crore. Their hyper-local business model is lauded for saving not only time but also capital ZopNow has been able to expand to three more cities spending less than $20,000 (`12.6 lakh) at each.This also translates into benefits for customers, said Mukesh Singh, the company's cofounder and CEO, a PhD dropout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who previously held top positions at MakeMyTrip and Amazon India.“Our warehouse was carrying around 10,000 products, but HyperCity stores (ZopNow's onground partner) carry over 100,000,“ he said.Amazon's grocery initiative does not hold any stock either. Its recently launched `Kirana Now' programme allows neighbourhood stores to list their inventory on its website. “The next generation of ecommerce is hyper-local mobile commerce for frequent-use cases such as groceries and food,“ said Shailendra Singh, managing director of Sequoia Capital India, which backs PepperTap and Grofers as well as their American counterpart Instacart. “Larger portfolio companies such as Ola and Zomato focusing on hyper-local is further validation that this is a very large opportunity.“ Several brick-and-mortar retailers like Aditya Birla, Spencer's, and Trent have been expanding in the space, but their collective losses crossed Rs 13,000 crore in fiscal year 2014, according to credit rating agency Crisil. Reliance Fresh has launched online grocery delivery in Mumbai. BigBasket, which also sells its own brand of staples online, has been able to maintain profit margins above 20% and is on course towards profitability, said Menon. Newcomers in pure logistics plays, where margins are thinner at between 2% and 4%, have to play to their strengths and scale up quickly.And experts say, unlike with online marketplaces that can afford to compete with each other with deep discounting, the online grocery battle will have to be fought also with product quality and range, packaging, delivery times and customer service. Consolidation has already started in the segment. Grofers bought Gurgaon-based competitor Mygreenbox earlier this month. Offline gourmet retailer Godrej's Nature Basket recently acquired Ekstop.com as part of its online strategy, and has tied up with ecommerce giants Snapdeal and Amazon to bring its offerings online. “When national or regional players with a technological edge enter a smaller city, they can buy out local players and get a ready customer base,“ said Seema Gupta, assistant professor of marketing at IIM-Bangalore, who also cofounded industry newcomer YouMart.At the end of the day, all players agree that the larger war being fought is on customer loyalty. For now, all hands are on deck to figure out exactly how to keep the customer in the bag. Evelyn Fok ET24APR15

EDUCATION SPECIAL....................... IIT-IIM (1) IS BRAND IIT-IIM WANING?

IS BRAND IIT-IIM WANING?





IIT, IIM: these magical letters have launched several thousand I corporate careers, shaped the destiny of Corporate India and even boosted literary careers and marriage prospects. But is the magic fading? A study by executive search firm EMA Partners revealed that only 28% of CEOs of India Inc's top 200 companies had an IIT, IIM qualification.

“It's certainly a diminishing trend,“ says K Sudarshan, regional managing partner, Asia, EMA Partners. A similar study done by EMA Partners in 2009 had revealed that half of India Inc's top CEO either had an IIT or IIM degree. Sudarshan recalls instances of HR heads of some MNC companies in the FMCG insisting on an IIM(A) degree as a prequalification. That, he says, is a matter of the past. (see article below: Losing the magic touch?) Even as IITs and IIMs struggled to meet the demand of a booming economy in the mid-2000s, other institutes stepped up to fill the gap. “Graduates of IITs and IIMs are becoming a smaller and smaller part of India's knowledge ecosystem,“ says Mohandas Pai, Chairman, Manipal Global Education and former Infosys board member. “Of the 30 million students in colleges, eight million graduate annually. The IIMs would be graduating 2,5003,000 and IITs about 10,000. Twenty-thirty years back, when the education system was smaller, the best people went to IITs. Now there's a 50% reservation in IITs and IIMs. So many people are applying and you have to go through a cramming test to enter these places.“

It's an argument Vineet Nayar, former CEO of HCL Technologies, sees a lot of merit in.“The effort required to get into an IIM or IIT is so intense that exhaustion sets in,“ he says. “Because of that we are getting a lot of people into companies from IITs and IIMs who don't want to work after the two years because they have an entitlement mindset.“ Another interesting insight: just over a third (34%) of all CEOs with IIM degrees are in the consumer retail space. “The IIT and IIM grads have all been in the system for the last 20 years and were hired two decades back. At that time, FMCG was king. Today, the best would join consulting firms. It's the newer, younger companies where IIT and IIM graduates are not CEOs,“ says Pai.

CDET24APR15

INNOVATION SPECIAL ..............Most Innovative Companies

Most Innovative Companies

In the past, few companies which were declared as most innovative, collapsed in the next few years and its leaders were marched to the prison (e.g. Enron.) The criteria being used to evaluate the innovativeness of a company was very narrow – R & D budget, patents, financial performance, innovation premium etc. Cases like Enron show that the criteria used are incomplete and needed for a relook.

Robert Tuckers, Founder – President of the Innovation Resource Consulting Group, California, proposes additional criteria like – visionary leadership, innovation culture, customer delight, reputation, unique business model, sustainability etc. are also to be included along with the subjectivity being used. Accordingly compiled is the list of companies considered as most innovative and their unique practices are described.

1 Alibaba:

The founder, Jack Ma was told repeatedly “e-commerce will never work in China, people here simply do not trust the internet.” But Ma’s vision pressed ahead anyway, and today Alibaba sells twice as much merchandise as Amazon, and eight per cent of everything sold in China. Alibaba is often described as E-Bay, Google, and Amazon combined. To build trust with Chinese consumers, Ma created Alipay (similar to PayPal), and adopted a liberal returns policy to fulfil its mission “to make it easy to do business anywhere.” Alibaba’s priorities: customers first, employees second, and shareholders third.

2 Nike:

Own 92 per cent of the basketball shoe market, and over 50 per cent of the running shoe market, and they still acts like a hungry start up. Their “category offense” strategy calls for growth not just from selling more shoes or apparel, but by dominating entire sports: football, soccer, golf or tennis. Through their website, customers can design their own shoes in extreme detail, right down to the colour of the eyelets. While innovation is everybody’s responsibility at Nike, the company’s Innovation Kitchen is where scientists cook up game-changing concepts like ‘Flyknit’ Racers, feather-light shoes that feel “like a sock atop a sole.”

3 Tesla:

Tesla Motors encourage other auto manufacturers to adopt Tesla’s patents(!) in order to build electric vehicles faster into a mass market. While other car companies sell through dealers, Tesla sells through its own showrooms in shopping malls to build a direct relationship with customers. All software used in its vehicles is developed in-house, a model closer to Apple, than to conventional automakers. Such bold moves exemplify how Tesla is rethinking the car business from top to bottom. The fastest way to lose an argument at Tesla is to say “such and such [auto] company does it this way,” according to insiders. (It is always ‘Do what others have not done.’) Not failing often or fast enough gets noticed in this hard-charging culture. “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

4 Uber:

They completely overturned the taxi-transportation business in 270 cities worldwide. And they kept away regulators and “me too” competitors using software, lawyers and guts, instead of fleets and hoards of dispatchers required by the traditional industry. They believe, ‘Short term war is a great way to inspire innovation.’ Customers love being able to summon a car with the touch of a smartphone app. But they are conflicted about Uber’s varying pricing, which increases up in periods of high demand. (Uber is banned in India!)

5 Google:

A Google engineer, planning a trip to Spain found he could not get a close up view of the hotel he was to stay in since the road was too narrow for the StreetView car to photograph. Rather than shrug that it was “not my job,” the engineer used Google’s famous 20 per cent free time policy to create the Google Tricycle to film narrow lanes. Such action at the grass root level, no doubt, shows ‘innovation in every realm’ is every ones business in Google. Innovations emerging from GoogleX, the search giant’s secretive skunk works lab, include the now famous driverless cars, Google Glass, and a plethora of less well known projects. Examples: blood glucose monitoring contact lenses and eatable “painted” nanoparticles that conceivably will bind to cancer cells and other biomarkers in the body and allow scientists to “read” what they find.

6 GE:

GE welcomes outsiders with new skillsets. They have made innovation a more systematic, embedded discipline. GE’s latest iteration is called FastWorks. Bringing the Lean Startup movement in-house, its purpose is to decrease time to market, lower the cost of building new products, and involve the customer early and often. Each business unit has a “growth board,” which meets to allocate resources in house potential projects.

7 IBM:

During the mid-2000’s, IBM invited thousands of employees, clients, consultants and even employees’ family members to brainstorm new uses for company’s technologies. At the time it seemed like a PR move, but little more. Yet out of these sessions came IBM’s game-changing Smarter Planet initiative, as well as Watson, the artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. Good thing it crammed, as revenue and profit growth have been flat in recent years despite great effort. IBM’s challenge is clear: with the rise of cloud computing, corporate clients can largely do away with expensive data centres, and rent server capacity and processing power for far less than IBM charges to hire its consultants to run everything in house. CEO Ginny Rometty is pushing the troops to create new demand in Big Data, analytics and Watson.

The company is starting to make headway: IBM’s overall cloud client base doubled in the past year, and Watson is starting to gain traction.

8 Apple:

The iPhone 6 model’s revenue now accounts for more than half of the company’s gross revenue and the bulk of its profit. Most important of all, CEO Tim Cook proved in 2014 that Apple without Steve Jobs can carry on with innovation, and keep the culture he spawned intact. Steve established a set of values and Cook established preoccupations and tones that are completely enduring. Chief among them is a reliance on small creative teams whose membership remains intact to this day. Unlike Google and Facebook, Apple sells hardware and software, and has disrupted at least eight industries. With its new Apple Pay service, and the soon to be released Apple Watch, the future looks bright. Apple watch features a fitness tracker, wireless payment functionality, text messaging, and inductive charging beneath a touchscreen display.

9 Procter & Gamble:

The company pioneered Open Innovation, and connected with outside sources for new ideas. It set innovation stretch goals for every division and department and A G Lafley made innovation everybody’s business. His successor wasn’t able to keep up the momentum and a year ago, Lafley was brought back to rework his magic. But instead of focusing on innovation, Lafley has placed an emphasis on “restoring focus”, selling off scores of under-performing P&G brands, from Duracell batteries to Folgers coffee.

10 3M:

If you’ve ever wondered where a lot of the ideas on innovation management and innovation culture came from, one source is 3M. In contrast to Amazon, which seems to be trying to innovate everywhere (but can’t seem to make money anywhere), or even Tesla, which has yet to break even, 3M keeps churning out new products – and steady growth and profits. Example: the 15 Per cent Rule, now used at Google, where it became the 20 Per cent Rule. 3M employees were given 15 per cent discretionary time to create whatever they want. If an employee believes they have a worthy creation, they inject it into the firm’s “champion” new product development system, and the idea receives a fair hearing and resources. The famous Post-it Note came out of this process. Ditto the innovation metric that 3M pioneered decades ago called the Thirty Per cent Rule (30 per cent of each division’s revenues must come from products introduced in the last four years. *

FROM CS 94 APRIL 2015