Innovation in Software Services

There is a lot of noise everywhere on innovation. Even I have jumped into the bandwagon and have been trying my bit to innovate. Most people would agree that if one needs to remain competitive, one needs to innovate. As a person, one needs to do things innovatively, as a team one needs to find ways to work innovatively or design innovative solutions and products and as an organization, it has to have innovative processes. The USA has been the masters or innovation. Tons of patents are filed by the US companies every year. Among Asian countries, China and South Korea have also taken to being innovative and are increasingly filing patents. But in contrast, Indian companies seem to lack a bit in this area. We do not file as many patents every year. This may be going up, but we still fall far behind in this. However, I was pretty surprised to know that Infosys had filed some 60 odd patents till 2007. Tried to do some research on the net but could not gather much information on that. There was some mention of a mobile banking solution which was patented and some patents jointly with their customers. But I guess most of the work would be on process innovation. And with the way Infosys has been growing for the past 3 years in terms of man power, they should patent their hiring process!

But I think, Indian companies are making up for innovation by being resourceful. The Indian concept of “Jugaad”. This comes up while replicating processes and defining new processes. Though you may accuse me of generalizing things, the Indian mind always tries to do the work in the shortest possible way. Hence you can count on us in finding new short-cuts for everything. Everything can be done in this way. But what needs to be seen is how far this resourcefulness can propel the Indian companies in the global arena.