 "Anil Verma")
In a rapidly growing market where brand loyalty is fickle and products and services run the risk of becoming irrelevant owing to astounding technology advancements, it is imperative for corporations to reinvent themselves to stay the course and become future-ready. And the key to this is innovation.
Reinventing the organisational wheels and engineering new processes through innovation is a herculean task for businesses of all sizes and hues. However, the challenge becomes more pronounced for legacy organisations as they are faced with the prospect of reengineering decades-old processes and systems.
Regardless of the challenges, the success story of 118-year-old Indian conglomerate Godrej & Boyce is an illustrative example of how by pursuing innovation legacy organisations can trump competition and continue to enjoy consumer trust.
It was the need for looking at its business holistically in the face of growing competition and fast-changing consumer behaviour that led the top brass at Godrej & Boyce to further sharpen its focus on "innovation". The emphasis clearly was on understanding consumer behaviour in greater depth and coming up with products and services which would add value to their lives. It is this vision that led the company to establish its Innovation Centre in 2011.
Five years down the line, the innovation centre has seen Godrej & Boyce come up with product innovations such as ChotuKool (a portable, compact and customisable fridge for rural households) and Goldilocks (India's first-of-its kind personal locker securing personal valuables). In a hyper-competitive world, it is a real challenge for organisations like Godrej & Boyce to understand which are the products and what are the businesses that could have a real impact on people's lives. Hence, the focus is on encouraging companies to think much more holistically - about the businesses and categories they are in.
A 25,000 square feet research and development space, the Innovation Centre boasts 93 full-time employees working towards driving growth across business units in Godrej & Boyce, ranging from security solutions to appliances and furniture.
For Godrej & Boyce, innovation is a frame of mind and how you think about and approach problem solving. Innovation is using different lenses to approach a problem with the questions - is it good for users, the business and the planet? To begin with, the company encourages innovative thinking at multiple levels. Management and business heads encourage people to think out of the box, and to collaborate with others. It's with the help of specific programmes, workshops and conversations that the management is trying to influence the way the company's employees think and behave with the hope that all the discussions would tie up with things that Godrej & Boyce customers experience.
Leaders at the company believe that innovation comes in different shapes and sizes. Some lead to game-changing ideas, while others are small improvements on existing ideas. And all are equally valid. For instance, "Step" innovation is about improving its current businesses, while "Jump" and "Leap" are about working on disruptive innovation.
Godrej & Boyce has diverse businesses such as aerospace and security. In order to manage a conglomerate with different capabilities, catering to diverse industries and many kinds of customers, it's critical for the leaders to understand what ties all of them together. Therefore, for the company and its people it is important to understand and keep working towards the strengths and have a purpose that binds everything together.
The Godrej Innovation Centre helps the company leverage the technology and knowledge across its diverse business interests. It's a platform for employees to incubate new projects in collaboration with teams from individual business units. Projects range from the "future of security, from all aspects of security, including emotional security, for security business" to understanding what it means "to grow up digital" or "working with the real estate business to conceptualise what the future Indian home interior could look like".
Even as people collaborate to incubate ideas, the key focus of the innovation centre is to help build a common language around strategy and innovation. What this means is that design is an integral part of innovation and many a time design is a driver of user-centred innovation. "We are using design not to change the culture of the organisation but also to become innovative and profitable. A primary element of design thinking is simply ideating on a solution to address a problem or better meet a customer need," says Verma.
Further, to bring design thinking into the system the company conducts a number of strategic programmes for the senior leadership team. In addition, it has launched programmes such as Sprint, India Immersion Programme and Horizon. Sprint, launched in November 2014, is a three-month programme open to all Godrej & Boyce employees and primarily aimed at inviting good ideas. Once an idea is accepted, an individual is given time and access to internal company resources to build prototypes of their ideas. Meanwhile, the India Immersion Programme offers design school students and Godrej employees an opportunity to form small teams and work on real problems and arrive at solutions to help address consumer needs. Horizon is a six-month intensive module for employees which helps them gain expertise in design methods as they explore new business opportunities for Godrej & Boyce.
Despite visible success stories, the path to innovation has not been an easy one for the company, admits Verma. Since Godrej & Boyce is a 118-year-old organisation, there are some deep-rooted ways of working. Hence, one will always face resistance and a degree of inertia whenever new ways of working are adopted. However, change can still be brought if one provides direction and vision, engages the senior leadership team and workforce and is able to show progress and success.
Prized fruits of innovation
The innovation centre does explorative research in six areas - security, lifestyle, well-being, energy, productivity and connectivity. This research leads to insights and new concepts which can be adopted by existing businesses and contributes to the creation of new businesses. The team comes from different backgrounds, including design, marketing, research and business engineering. Here's a few innovative products developed at the innovation centre:
- Chotukool: It's a portable, compact and customisable fridge which maintains the humidity and nutritional value of food with low power consumption. All the components are placed in the lid, including the battery, so that it can be removed easily for servicing. The product targets consumers in rural areas and small towns. It is distributed through village panchayats and India Post.
- Goldilocks: A first-of-its kind in the world, it is a personal locker for everyday use where a user can store valuables like mobile, keys, wallet and iPods. It comes with a host of features like smart touch panel, anti-theft buzzer and a smart locking cable.
- SecuNext: A next-generation safe deposit locker, it comes with security features such as motion-censored inteliLIGHT which allows bank customers to use the locker even in the dark.
- NXW: It is a premium segment electronics and home appliance brand launched by Godrej this year. The next-generation refrigerators come with the tagline - for the real social network. The frost-free refrigerators sport technologies such as bottom-mounted technology and digital touch control panel.
