Think Flat

Coke story unfolds in recent edition of Information Week (click here for the article). If we look at the success behind such massive exercise, its technology based innovation infrastructure which stands out in bringing the Coke entities across markets in sharing their product/service innovations nitty-gritty. In global competitive landscape, collaboration is the key behind any successful innovation program. With Coke’s massive technology investment in this area, it could bring following changes to the way innovation is addressed-

• Collaboration and social networking between different markets – US market shared its product/service details with Japan, so also European countries with others. It is quite possible that a product may not work in UK, but might be accepted in Germany. This platform brought such coherence and decisioning to maximum effectiveness.
  
• Joint Innovation Program- Multiple markets can take a joint innovation effort which helped reaching to conclusion faster and at a lower cost- imagine the cost had those countries brainstormed separately. And also time to market for any innovative product / service is perceptively low.
  
• Co-Creating with Partners and Consumers – Technology platform not only caters to internal entities, but also brought the bottlers, distributors and the consumers to a single pedestal. This has helped Coke getting the partner & consumer perspectives to this innovation exercise. Partners also saw great value in receiving a platform where they can directly dialogue with end users at a little cost (bottlers, distributors decided to share a pie of technology cost also). At the same time, supply chain business processes got standardized to single infrastructure during this innovation drive.
  
• Reenergizing the Brand- Certain products in US may have failed, but works fine in Japan and so also certain service to partners may not be good for India, but makes sense to Australia. With a single platform sharing details about each new and existing product / service, it became easy for different markets to grab initiative at no time and took them to market. What resulted then? Coke financial results have been repositioned from US dependent mind-set to global market performance. All these have definitely rejuvenated the brand Coke at adverse market sentiments in most geography.
  

As we speak about Coke, nothing can deter the change product innovation has brought to brand TATA in global arena, ranked 6^th among the reputation leaders of the world (refer the report from Reputation Institute Global Pulse 2008). Very few will deny the role “Tata Nano” (Rs 1 Lac / USD 2500 approx), the innovative venture from Tata Motors, played in catapulting the brand recognition to this level.
 

Talking about Innovation, can’t forget to mention the new book of Prof C.K. Prahalad and Prof M.S. Krishnan called “The New Age of Innovation” where they have reinforced on two fundamental principles for continuous business innovation – N=1: “value is based on unique, personalized experiences of consumers” & R=G: “In order to achieve N=1, organizations have to reach Global eco-system to get Resources, not necessarily own them”. Next age innovative companies will have to have above two so that a flexible, resilient business process can be built where enterprise information architecture will work in tandem with managerial competency and behavior. In order to understand more, please listen to Prof Prahalad in conversation with Business Week (Part1, Part2).
 

Being the 14^th most reputed organization in the world (refer the report from Reputation Institute Global Pulse 2008), Infosys innovation program reflects most of these above points. To know more about it, read the recent presentation by Balaji Yellavalli in “The National Academies” last Sept.