An Innovation Rose In Your Garden

Last week, the Group CEO of Flipkart, India’s most famous e-commerce company authored an op-ed piece in the country’s largest circulated financial daily. Towards the end of the piece, he gets to the point behind this essay. Hear him: “Global innovations imported and force-fitted in India are unlikely to make an impact, because they lack the Indian context. India needs innovations … which should be geared to the way we want to develop as a nation, which could be unique and different from how other countries have prospered.”

The tirade against multinationals and calling out their irrelevance to India is what kept us in the economic dark ages for long.

The Indian market has got used to the ways of the world, and the tide cannot now be turned back. Our customers have tasted, like and need IBM, GE, Ikea, Ford Motors, Microsoft and Amazon. In 2017, this thought process is as pathetic as the telecom companies crying for regulatory help to overcome new competition. Why can’t they simply let the market decide?

Innovations, unlike inventions, must make money, and are hence market-defined rather than geography-dictated. A win happens when the market permits an innovation to make money.

This is not to say that MNCs are all noble and superior. But actions that seek to limit the available choices for customers in the world’s third largest economy is simply deplorable. Choices happen when all innovations from everywhere and anywhere are allowed full play.

With almost everyone having a different definition of what innovation is, misconceptions that innovations can be “imported” and “force-fitted” are not all that uncommon. Markets accept innovations. The Market, and the Market alone, will decide on embracing an innovation. That anybody can “force-fit” a product or an innovation into a Market smacks of arrogance, or a possible ignorance about how Markets function, or both.

Amazon has customers in Bagalkot who use them for the same reasons why someone in Albuquerque will use them.

In Wonder Woman, the movie that is a current rage in the theatres, a question is posed on whether mankind deserves a superhero to save them. We are told that the correct and more important question is whether the superheroes believe enough in mankind to bother saving them. It’s only when companies’ very survival is threatened that they talk about what the market deserves. Flipkart should flip the question and ask themselves about their level of belief in the Indian market, despite presence of others, and ever-changing regulatory environment.

A Market is very much like God and Time, two other entities that Man, from times immemorial, has been grappling with. Therefore, all three – God, Time and Market – have the following common properties:

1. They exist, whether you know they do, or recognise them.
2. They go on, and in his eagerness to make sense for himself, Man gives them shape, breaks them into days/weeks, or attributes properties to them.
3. They reward those who understand and use them well. They never punish anybody because they are not petty enough to judge anybody. Not rewarding somebody, according to their immutable laws, is the only punishment they hand out.

Lord Byron, in one of his poems, talks about a beautiful rose that you see in your neighbour’s garden, and you crave for a similar one in your own. The worst way to get one for yourself is to pluck the neighbour’s rose, and plant it in your soil. It will simply wither and die. To get one for yourself, you need to attend to your soil, and care for your plant just as the neighbour did for his rose.

True innovations will always command a premium. That premium has nothing to do with where the idea came from, or even who you are.

Vijay Govindarajan, Professor at the Tuck School of Management, in his book Reverse Innovations (with a sub-title that reads ‘Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere), gives scores of examples from global companies such as Gillette, Nokia and GE who made innovations for emerging markets and went on to make billions by introducing those very “innovations” in the developed markets. That is the way of smart companies.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Ramesh is a Corporate Speaker for Leadership and Strategic Meets. Ramesh’s approach and style are largely to do with interpreting and elaborating the factors that affect organisations, trends in the industry that the companies need to watch out for and the methods that they can use to achieve their goals.