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| Avinash Vashistha: Participatory innovation for sustaining growth | | Can the IT industry use its knowledge to help clients weather the slowdown and address the challenges and opportunities in front of them? |
| Avinash Vashistha / Feb 15, 2012, 18:31 IST |
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 In 2008-09, India as a nation and our corporate community withstood the impact of one of the world’s worst economic crisis since World War II. We must credit the strong GDP growth and fiscal numbers of our nation, as well as robust balance sheets of domestic industry, for helping India navigate through such a turbulent time.
The situation three years down the line has changed. The slow growth in the economy is being accompanied by high fiscal deficit and moderately high level of inflation. Despite this, there are silver linings too. Our exports are growing at a brisk pace and the basket of manufactured exports continues to diversify. Services sectors such as financial services and educational and healthcare services continue to expand as well.
The question before us is this: can the IT industry apply its strengths and knowledge to help clients weather this slowdown and address the challenges and opportunities in front of them?
I firmly believe that this is the time to be proactively working with industry and the government. Our IT industry has a track record of success achieving this. We have introduced unique business models to the world, created new-to-the-market applications, and created exciting work opportunities for youth not only in India but across nations. We now need to utilise our experiences and our acquired strengths wisely.
Just to share a few examples...
• The unique identification initiative (UID) is a great example to begin with. The UID has laid the foundation not only for good governance but for profitable business too. We now need to create compelling IT-driven business models that our clients can take to governments to implement public-private partnerships.
• Skills development is another area in which IT should take the lead to train and develop a strong pipeline of employable talent. The industry has a rich experience to train scalably and needs to explore how its experience can be leveraged in other key sectors.
• Inclusive innovations, i.e. innovative products, processes and business models bridging gaps between organised markets and low income populations – are becoming the hallmark of Indian manufacturing and services sector. IT has a tremendous role to play in helping entrepreneurs scale these solutions and their impact.
Addressing these business and national priorities will enable us to disrupt our existing business models and make them non-linear. Compulsions of scaling and financial viability will push companies to think differently; both in terms of talent deployment and the cost for acquiring such talent. Companies therefore will have to approach the situation differently. They will have to engage talent outside the organisation and invest in training this talent. This will result in optimisation of talent for the company, but most importantly, will also contribute towards building a talent pipeline that can be leveraged to transform India into a high performance nation.
But as the industry embarks on such a strategy, it will need to invest in the creation of a workforce that is ready to work within organisations whose growth is characterised by non-linear business models (NLBMs). The existing and future workforce will have an appetite for NLBMs in a market backed by robust institutions supporting market-required-skills, affordable healthcare and educational opportunities. Such an environment will incentivise engineers, technicians, software developers and many others to experiment within and outside the boundaries of their projects.
Operationalising this strategy is not going to be easy. Initially, companies will have to put in extra efforts to take the strategy off the ground. However, in the long run we would have created an ecosystem based on a strong foundation comprising IT-driven business models, skilled workforce and participatory innovation. Most importantly, we will have simultaneously grown as an industry and a nation.
(The author is Chairman & Managing Director, Accenture, India)
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