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Here’s how India’s “Product Nation” ambition be achieved and what the Budget can do for that ambition

The Next Google, Made in India

If you look at the Indian business landscape, you will see several successful services companies in fields like airlines (e.g. Jet, Indigo), health care (e.g. Apollo, Manipal), mobile phone services (e.g. Idea, Airtel) and IT Services (e.g. TCS, Infosys). Many of these companies are comparable to global peers, if not potential world beaters. What we don’t have are the corresponding product companies. We don’t have an aircraft maker like Boeing, a pharma company like Pfizer, a network equipment company like Cisco, or a software product company like Microsoft.

Is this is a problem? Yes. Because Boeing and Airbus alone generate almost as much profit as all global airlines put together. Pfizer’s profits are more than the profits of top 100 hospitals in US. Cisco’s profits are more than those of all European mobile operators. Microsoft generates more profit that the profits of top 20 pure-play global IT Services firms. Take a moment to digest that and it becomes clear that if India remains bereft of product companies, it won’t be a sustainable economy in the future.

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Building product companies is hard, to be sure. Despite the fanfare, Tata Motors’ Nano has failed. And, sadly, Bajaj has been humbled by Honda in the last two years. In high-tech, Ittiam, despite its success in developing core intellectual property in online video, hasn’t broken into the main league. And, with our borders open to global competition, is it too far fetched to imagine that in a few years Amazon would have pipped Flipkart and Uber, not Ola, would rule our roads? We may have Indian players serving our digital consumers, but most categories might be dominated by foreign companies. Google already owns our search, Skype owns voice messaging, Facebook owns social media.

Is India destined to lose all these battles? Maybe not! But if we have to win, we have to embrace a new gameplan. Products, especially software products, are a winner-take-all business. Either you win or you are a nobody. Its not a place for the faint hearted.

In fact, tentativeness translates into a loss. It leads to sub-critical investments. We are staring at a costly example of this in the nuclear reactor industry right now. India can build 700 MW reactors. But economies of scale now kick-in at 1600 MW. Since we didn’t invest enough in the last 20 years (despite a wonderful start that Homi Bhabha gave us in 1950s), we are not a player in this large-reactor segment. So we will spend more on buying these bigger reactors from France, Russia and US in the next three years than what we have spent on our entire nuclear industry in the past 50 years! This is a really expensive failure.

If this was a one-off case it would still be okay. It is unfortunately not. In telecom, despite CDOT, CDAC and Sam Pitroda, we have only created one Tejas Networks, a nifty networking start-up from Bangalore. But, guess what? Tejas gets a pidly 1% of the annual telecom capex buys in the country. Rest is imported. We have a big rail network but no rail equipment companies. We are a generic drugs superpower but limp when it comes to new drug discoveries. These failures to create product winners don’t even faze us. We pretend it doesn’t matter.

We don’t even introspect why this is the case. When one sets out to create the world’s best hospital, airline or IT Services company, one builds in layers over years. But building a world class product company needs a different mindset. You have go all-in and bet-the-company on market or technology shift that is underway. This mindset is new to us in India. Our success in building services companies comes in the way. We have to accept this Provenance Effect; it is subtle yet significant.

To be sure, we are not the only victims of this effect. Taiwan is a victim of this too. It isn’t a player in mobile phones, ironically, because its design services legacy holds it back. Venezuela is not able to crack the chocolate market. El Ray owns the high end cocoa market, a key raw ingredient in chocolate, but comes up a cropper in high chocolates. If you ask the Belgians or Swiss, they tell you that they are a chocolate nation because they don’t have the cocoa mindset. Lack of a services industry legacy helps not just Korea but also Estonia (created Skype) and Finland (land of Nokia and Angry Bird games). It turns out that mindset matters — big time!

We have to jettison two ideas that hold us back from becoming a Product Nation! The first one is rather simple. We have to accept that no matter how well-run Indigo Airlines is it’ll not become a Embraer or Boeing. Similarly, a Narayana Hrudayalaya hospital will never bring a drug to market like a Pfizer does. Airtel or Verizon will never build a router like Cisco or Juniper do. And TCS will never be a Microsoft. Acknowledging this plain reality is the first step that we must take.

Then, we must discard our mentality of unbridled greed and reluctance to make bets — best showcased in our penchant for large Olympics contingents. Nobody cares about how many athletes you send to a sports competition, they only care about the number of medals you won. To improve odds of winning, small focussed efforts produce better results than grandiose schemes. Today, we have four times more new startups than Israel for one-sixth the outcomes. One reason is that the ecosystem enablers are narrowly sector focussed in Israel. The accelerators that help medical device companies don’t work with cyber-security start-ups there. Can’t we have a sector-focussed approach in India aiming at solar energy or medical devices, to name just two promising areas to bet on? If someone needs proof of concept: look at our performance in badminton and wrestling in India in recent years. The enablers in these sports are game-specific. Anything that smells like a generic “startup” program will have a low impact. It quite likely to be a scam!

Software product entrepreneurs when they are successful make a big economic impact in this winner-take-all world. So they are being courted worldwide. US is trying to get the Startup Visas in place for them. Canada already has a working program. Singapore has startup tax exemption. UK is in the game too. In our last budget there was a tantalizing line about “a special focus on software product startups”. Nine months have passed and nothing material has happened yet. Maybe this new budget will bring some well thought-out policies to light. This year 75% of newly funded software product startups will redomicile themselves in Singapore or US (up from 54% last year).

It is time for India to wake up to our Product Nation imperative. It is an opportunity for the NDA government to write history again. In 1998, they introduced a 108 point policy for IT services and we have the benefits around us to see. Now, they must do the same for software products. For the first time in modern India’s history, we have a chance to create world-winning products from India. The decisions we take today to support our flight to become a Product Nation will decide whether tomorrow’s Google, Viagra,Facebook, or Uber come from our nation. Act now.

Jointly written by Mohandas Pai & Sharad Sharma for Economic Times. 

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Building Innovative Products Out of India: Lessons from Bell Labs India, CDOT, Cisco, Concept2Silicon and Ittiam

What will it take to build an Apple or Google out of India? This is a question we often ask, and you might recall that I gave one perspective on this in my Outlook Business column some months ago.

Sanjay Nayak of Tejas Networks has devoted the last decade to building high tech telecom products out of India. He is passionate about building a supportive product ecosystem in Bangalore/India. So, when he invited me to moderate a panel discussion on “Fostering an Innovation Economy in India: Issues, Challenges & Recommendations” at the IEEE ANTS 2012 conference at Bangalore last week, I jumped at the opportunity.

We had great participants – Vishy Poosala of Bell Labs, VVR Sastry of CDOT (former CMD of Bharat Electronics), Srini Rajam of Ittiam, Satya Gupta of concept2silicon (and present chair of the Indian Semiconductor Association), and Ishwar Parulkar of Cisco, I had requested each participant to start with a short account of a successful innovation project they had been associated with in India, and what made it work. Since we hear so much about the obstacles to innovation in India, I thought some bright spots may offer ways around these.

And, a real treat followed as we got some insightful examples from all the speakers.

Vishy Poosala – Alcatel Lucent (Bell Labs)

Vishy started by describing an interesting phenomenon his team noticed. Rather than download songs legally available through mobile service providers, mobile owners preferred to buy songs from a corner store. The obvious reason was cost – it’s much more expensive to buy songs “legally.” Why do downloaded songs cost more? His team found out that the reason for this was that the service providers had congested networks, and therefore did not want to promote downloads that would congest their networks further. Bell Labs India proposed a solution to this problem – a “Mango Box” which could push content to users at off peak times when there was no congestion, and hence songs (or other content) could be sold cheaper. While they managed to commercialise this product in India, revenues were never big enough to excite AT&T. Ultimately, “Mango” got traction when it was deployed in the US for use on AT&T’s iphone network. The lessons? Address local problems, but look out for global problems where the same solution can be applied.Vishy mentioned that AL ventures, an internal venturing arm of Alcatel Lucent played a key role in making this cross-fertilization happen.

Srini Rajam – Ittiam

Srini went next. Ittiam has completed a successful decade of a focused IP play. It earns all its revenues from licensing IP it has created. In 2009, Ittiam identified that the then smartphones did not have the capability to play HD video. Creating that capability was non-trivial because it involved change in the software architecture and working with both handset and silicon players. There was a window of opportunityopen, and Ittiam sought to address this by quickly creating the IP, filing a patent and then working with the players to implement it. Not only were 10 million phones incorporating this IP sold in the first year, one of Ittiam’s major clients highlighted the HD video playback in its product marketing collateral. Based on this experience, Srini stressed the importance of innovation as a process – the spark (idea), followed by implementation, and then business impact. Clearly, as in the Alcatel Lucent case, choice of the product is key as well.

VVR Sastry – CDOT

After CDOT’s pioneering efforts on switching for rural exchanges in the 1980s, CDOT disappeared from public imagination. While it has continued to be involved in strategic projects, it’s no longer “visible.” Sastry of CDOT gave one example of how CDOT is trying to change that. Mobile base stations are power guzzlers and are already being targeted by environmentalists for their high carbon footprint. At the same time, rural call rates are not always high, and rural cellular infrastructure is under-utilized. CDOT is trying to solve this problem through shared GSM radio. With the regulators possibly allowing spectrum sharing, this could be a way for better utilization of rural cellular infrastructure. While admittedly a late life cycle product with an emerging market focus, this has the potential to lower costs yet provide multi-operator service in rural locations. Sastry stressed “right product at the right time”, providing a “total product concept” and keeping up the motivation of engineers.

Satya Gupta – Concept2Silicon

Satya Gupta’s company Concept2Silicon is just 3 years old. He encourages innovation through Friday brainstorming sessions. He stressed the importance of aligning new product ideas with needs and timing. In particular, he underlined the importance of aligning products to local conditions and price points. He outlined one important opportunity. Education is rapidly shifting from the traditional classroom to electronic media. But the electronic media used in the classroom are not interactive and don’t allow the teacher to adapt/change content or modify / add comments easily. Interactive whiteboards are available, but they are imported and too expensive. This is an area where Concept2Silicon sees product innovation opportunities.

Ishwar Parulkar – Cisco

Ishwar is the CTO of Cisco’s Provider Access Business Unit in Bangalore. He shared the highlights of the ASR 901 router, the first product developed end-to-end by Cisco in India (see my earlier post on this project for more details). Defining what product to build in India was critical – they chose a router for access providers (= mobile service providers) not only because this was a relevant market in India but also because this was not a core segment addressed by Cisco’s existing products. Scale, reliability and monetization were 3 key criteria for Cisco. To build the product in Bangalore, Ishwar’s team had to persuade vendors to enhance their local capabilities. They also had to transfer knowledge in certain areas like certification. Thus product development efforts involved building a local ecosystem. The third element was creating an appropriate organizational and operational model – there were 3 stages: an incubation stage (under the radar) till a concept could be proved, a stage of scale up with “borrowed resources,” and a third stage of mainstreaming with more funding.Today, ASR 901 has a market not only in India, but across the world.

Fostering an Innovation Economy

In the discussion that followed, several interesting questions came up which addressed the larger theme that Sanjay had identified for the session:

1. Will India be restricted to “late in the life cycle” or niche products, or will we be able to come out with genuinely new products?

2. What needs to be done to improve the innovation ecosystem?

3. How does India compare to China on the innovation front?

4. How can we improve collaboration between academia and industry?

5. How can we enhance the economic dividend to India of innovation activities here?

Most of the comments in response to the first question identified the usual obstacles to creating really innovative products from India: hierarchy in Indian society (vs. the questioning attitude required to do genuine innovation); fear of failure; the education system; and inadequate private sector investment in R&D. There was agreement that many of these things are changing, and the future looks optimistic. But the slow growth of private sector R&D investment continues to be an issue of concern.

Satya Gupta had some very specific and relevant suggestions on improving product innovation. His own experience in his company has been that even the components required for product innovation are not easily available, and often need to be imported with delays of upto 3-4 weeks. This slows down the innovation process, and also demotivates the innovator. He called for the setting up of resource centres – he called them ESDM innovation centres – that are fully equipped and ready-to-use for experimentation. This will help start-up entrepreneurs quickly try out new ideas.

There was broad agreement that China has been able to do several things on a scale that India is unable to even dream of – these include development of infrastructure, education in science and technology, funding for start-ups etc. China has a strong desire to dominate telecom and has therefore supported the creation of large corporations like Huawei and ZTE. In contrast, India lacks a strategic orientation, is unable to spend the R&D money committed because of cumbersome bureaucratic processes, and is no longer even the source of the largest number of graduate students abroad.

Regarding academia-industry collaboration, speakers pointed to the incentive systems in Indian academia that appear to favour academic research resulting in papers and do not give importance to industrial R&D. A specific example was given of a person with considerable international corporate R&D experience who was denied a job in one of the IITs because she did not have adequate research output (=papers in journals).

The fifth question – economic dividend for india – prompted an interesting discussion around value capture in the innovation process. Sanjay Nayak wondered aloud whether Indian companies need to invest more in marketing and branding if India is to capture more value. There was a broad agreement that collaboration was key to improving the economic returns to India – and that even multinational subsidiaries in India may gain from collaborating with each other rather than trying to “sell” their innovations to reluctant managements in the developed world.

Does innovation have to be a struggle? Or can it be the mainstream of a company’s activities? Many speakers pointed out that innovation involves change, and most human beings don’t like change. Hence innovation will always involve overcoming obstacles. Ishwar pointed out that even in Apple, ideas are hard fought. But I felt that companies like 3M, Google, and our own Titan have shown that innovation can become a more routine activity of the company.

Conclusion
I see confidence in our abilities to innovate from India growing, and that’s a good thing. There is a new generation of innovation evangelists returning to India (people like Vishy and Ishwar) who are determined to make things happen here. At the same time, we have people like Srini and Sanjay who have shown that good innovation can come out of India and that it’s possible to run innovative companies here. Of course, it’s not easy, but I see the formation of a critical mass of people who know how to make innovation work. Let’s hope a lot more people get inspired by their examples in the days to come.