JOIN USTata Sons, the holding company of the Tata Group, certainly seems to be bullish about the prospects of its innovations. The group is likely to save around $1.1 billion in 2014-15 due to its innovations, according to Tata Group Chief Technology Officer Gopichand Katragadda.
“We estimate the annualised economic benefit delivered by the top 60 innovations deployed in 2014-15 to be around $1.1 billion,” Katragadda said. Some 35 million people’s lives are likely to be impacted by these 60 innovations of 2014-15 in the next five years, Katragadda added.
Tata Innovista is a group-wide programme, held annually by the Tata Group Innovation Forum (TGIF) to encourage, recognise, and showcase outstanding innovations done by Tata companies.
Tata Innovista 2015 received around 1,580 projects under the ‘Promising Innovations’ category as compared with 101 in 2006, signifying a 15-fold increase. According to Katragadda, the group is also in the process of filing more and more patents to support the innovations. “We have registered over 2,000 patents in the group and are seeing an improved trend across sectors. In the last couple of years, it has increased significantly and we are headed towards doubling that in the next three years,” Katragadda said.
According to Tata Sons group executive council and brand custodian Mukund Govind Rajan, it is the group’s endeavour to increase spending on research and development (R&D) going forward. “Our R&D spend is 2-2.5 per cent of the group turnover currently and we certainly intend to increase it going forward,” Rajan said. In 2013-14, we spent Rs 16,000 crore ($2.6 billion) on R&D, Rajan added. India’s GDP-to-R&D ratio currently stands at around 0.9 per cent.