Schumpeter believed that the entrepreneur is the key to
innovation for the entrepreneur tries to find new value for resources in an
effort to grow his enterprise. The quest of this blog is to see whether and how
the nature of innovation in India is changing, and its therefore useful to
periodically take a look at the entrepreneurial landscape.
I profiled some interesting companies earlier like
Vigyanlabs, the Mysore-based provider of energy management solutions for
datacenters; Fusioncharts, a leading source of data visualization tools; and MadRat Games, the pioneer of educative Indian language board games. This blog post is
devoted to three more interesting companies I came across recently.
Inc. India magazine recently did a special issue on India’s
most innovative mid-sized companies. A couple of the companies profiled here
come from their list.
Emmbi Industries Ltd.: Building the Right Challenge Book
Emmbi is a Rs. 140 Crore company making polyester woven
sacks and other polymer-based woven products. Started by first generation
entrepreneurs Makarand and Rinky Appalwar, in the mid-1990s, Emmbi is has won
several awards over the years. The article on Emmbi in Inc.’s December 2013
issue gives some insight into why Emmbi has been so successful.
The article describes how Emmbi faced a problem typical of
many manufacturing situations: the set-up and processing time of their
manufacturing unit implied a certain minimum production run of a product for
cost-effective production, so they could not accept smaller size orders even
though plenty were available. They soon realized that obvious solutions like
buying another piece of machinery with smaller capacity and changing the yarn
after every 6-hour run were not good options. But, another experiment with the
use of three specially-designed moulds allowed them to make 3 different types
of yarn in parallel without shutting down for a fresh set up. This increased
their flexibility to produce multiple yarns at the same time in lower quantities,
meeting the demands of their customers more precisely, reducing inventory and
getting better realizations. This is an excellent example of how innovation in
the manufacturing process can yield increases in sales and profits.
How did this innovation happen? According to the Inc.
article, this came about thanks to a concerted effort at problem solving by the
engineering team in the Emmbi plant. If you read 8 Steps to Innovation, you’ll
recall the importance of the Challenge Book (Identifying the right problems to
solve) in the innovation process. Emmbi zeroed in on a pain point (its
inability to serve smaller orders effectively), rode a wave (customers looking
for specialized technical materials in small quantities) and tackled waste
(inventory pile up) effectively in coming up with this innovation.
Premier Explosives Ltd.: Adversity can drive Innovation
My co-author, Vinay Dabholkar, is
fond of emphasizing that innovation is driven more by curiosity than by
creativity (see his nice new video). Premier Explosives is a company which has
done what appears to be impressive innovation driven by adversity, and the
resulting urge to solve a critical problem.
Premier Explosives is a Rs. 60
crore company run by Mr. A.N. Gupta, a veteran of the explosive industry. They
have worked closely with Defence R&D projects in India. Till a few years
ago, Premier was using ASA as the primary explosive for its detonators. ASA is
a material commonly used for this purpose, but has drawbacks including high
sensitivity and environmentally-unfriendly lead residues.
An accident in Premier’s plant in
July 2012 that led to the death of two workers forced Mr. Gupta to question the
wisdom of continuing to use ASA-based detonators. Premier already had access to
technology for another less sensitive compound, NHN, that it had sourced from
ISRO’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, but had been unable to develop a
commercial process using this material. The accident acted as a trigger to
Premier to undertake sandbox-style intense experimentation in a short time to tweak
multiple parameters to create a viable process to make detonators using NHN.
According to the Inc. article, this makes Premier one of the first companies in
the world to do so, and they are filing for Indian and international patents on
their technology.
Mr. Gupta attributes his company’s
ability to innovate to Premier’s focus on involving people in the
decision-making process, and transparency of functioning.
Trimed: Ready for business model exploration
On a recent visit to Chennai, I had the privilege of
visiting Trimed’s main centre just off Anna Salai at Teynampet. One of Trimed’s
founders is an old friend, Raghu Venkatnarayan (when we were together at IIMA,
I never expected that Raghu would become a serial entrepreneur, but that’s
exactly what he has turned out to be!). Trimed defies easy description – it’s
not a spa (though it offer some things in common), it’s not a hospital and it’s
not just a clinic. Instead, Trimed is trying to re-define holistic and
integrative healthcare.
The heart and soul of Trimed, is an eminent neurologist, Dr.
Ennapadam Krishnamoorthy. His qualifications and achievements fill up a whole
wall and are prominently displayed at the Trimed main centre I visited. In
treating patients with symptoms of acute stress and many of the occupational
hazards of modern life, he realized that the required treatment was rarely
medication alone. In addition to counselling, therapies like Yoga,
physiotherapy, and Ayurveda could often be of help. But most doctors were often
unwilling to use these approaches and even if they were willing, the patient
would find it difficult to obtain high quality treatment in these areas. This
is the niche that Trimed fills.
I was impressed by the novelty of the idea. But like all
products and services that are different from the existing dominant model,
Trimed now faces the challenge of exploring different business models (Step 6
of our 8 Steps model) to discover how to convert this integrative approach into
a sustainable business proposition.
Tailpiece
Though India is usually seen as a place for IT innovation,
some of the most exciting innovation may be happening in companies such as
Emmbi, Premier and Trimed. I look forward to discovering more such companies in
the times ahead.
[The views expressed here are the personal views of the
author.]
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