JOIN USMNCs in India raise bar on innovation
Breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited.
— Clayton Christensen
Quick question. Why does innovation-focused Texas Instruments (TI) put people with multiple different skills into the same project right at the beginning, including someone with no idea about it?
Because the company believes if they put people with similar thinking in a project, they will be handicapped with a one-sided focus. During a recent interaction, TI (India) President and Managing Director Santhosh Kumar explained the concept, “This is how we accelerate innovation using a process called Quick Prototyping. Suppose you have to have a big product. We try to do small things quickly to figure out whether it is viable. Second, we put people with multiple different skills into the same project right at the beginning. For example, a marketing person, a systems person, a digital engineer, an analog engineer, and someone who has got no idea about it. We need people with multiple skills to come together and quickly do a prototype.”
Even as it places emphasis on being quick with prototyping, the $13-bn Dallas-based semiconductor company also makes it a point to take a deep dive to comprehend everything about what it does.
Engineers at TI India may just be working on one component, but “we think about everything related to it and then the product”, Santhosh Kumar said.
“To give an example, we have actually created lot of chips that go into CT scan and ultrasound scan systems. But for medical equipment companies like GE Healthcare to look at us seriously, we needed to know their systems completely,” he said.
“For us innovation is really understanding the whole system and really solving the problem that we actually solve really well. We are looking at higher levels of value, not size or anything else.”
TI is this year celebrating the 30th anniversary of setting up its first R&D centre in Bengaluru. TI India plays a central role in the parent’s process
and product innovations.
3M India rejigs plant
Innovation is also central to 3M India, the local arm of the world’s most diversified company. Its MD Amit Laroya recently told Deccan Herald how 3M India made a mark in process innovation.
“We have 27 divisions. We had a tape coating plant belonging to the industrial, diesels, and tape division. It was a fairly new plant, so it was not filled to capacity. But the Indian engineers were able to configure the plant to make adhesives for films. It may sound easy, but it took the engineers and R&D people a lot of work to get there. Because it was not meant for that. Now the coating is not used for one, but for four different divisions. So the R&D people and engineers have shown that it can be done, that’s kind of giving us some good claim outside India,” Laroya said.
The spirit of innovation
TI India puts people with multiple different skills into the same project
This facilitates a process known as Quick Protoyping
TI engineers also try to comprehend everything about what it does
3M India R&D converted a tape coating plant to make adhesives as well
Its engineers perfected a tube which illuminates factory floors without electricity