The occasional light expression

Business Today recently released a BT-Monitor group study on India’s most ‘innovative’ companies. This is a timely study and it brings out some of the key areas in which Indian companies are innovating – unique distribution channels, customizations for first time consumers, lower cost product development, and in some cases, technology interventions.

However, I believe this study is incomplete and skewed because it fails to take into account two dimensions that are highly critical to innovation: Consumer Experience and Product/service differentiation through Design.

Consider similar lists released recently by Fortune and Business Week documenting the world’s most innovative companies.

Here is Fortune’s top 10 list: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/mostadmired/best_worst/best1.html)

Now look at Business Week’s top 50 list: (http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/most_innovative/index.asp)

Scanning across the names of the world’s top innovators what are the common threads you find? Is it simply low cost product development? (No- they all contract manufacture in China). Is it lower prices (No – companies like Whole Foods and Apple have significant markup)

No – what is truly common (or uncommon) to Apple, Whole Foods, Amazon, Starbucks and even once-stodgy technology giants like Cisco is their relentless pursuit to creating a compelling, integrated and delightful user experience for their end consumers. Not only how to streamline costs and operations but how to make their offerings resonate with customers’ deepest needs and desires.

Here’s how BW put it “Not so long ago, no conversation about innovation would be complete without the story of 3M inventor Art Fry’s eureka moment that led to the Post-it Note. Today, that tale, which verges on cliche, has been almost universally replaced by the story of the iPod, Apple’s omnipresent icon of design. It should come as little surprise, then, that Apple tops the BusinessWeek-Boston Consulting Group’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for the third year in a row. That sort of staying power speaks volumes about the sort of innovation that matters today. Unlike the Post-it Note, which proves the value of lone inventors, the iPod epitomizes today’s innovation sensibilities. These include the ascendance of design, the focus on the user’s experience, and the power of ecosystems….”

My conclusion – some if not many of the Indian firms that are being touted as ‘innovative’ as currently innovative simply because of a temporary cost benefit, a monopolistic market position, or deep pockets. These firms will struggle in years to come as Indian consumers and indeed global consumers become more and more demanding in the ‘experiences’ from these companies and their products and services.

Here is my pick of two sectors that may lose their ‘innovation’ edge unless they get their customer experience defined right, and soon.

1.      Airlines – In this sector, consumer experience can range from frustrating to terrifying. Read some of the first hand accounts below on the rudeness, unprofessionalism and callousness of the service staff of some Indian airlines.

http://expertdabbler.com/2006/07/25/air-deccan-simply-cry/print/

http://jerinj.blogspot.com/2006/07/low-cost-airline-take-train.html

http://www.m-travel.com/news/2007/03/air_deccan_taki.html

http://youthcurry.blogspot.com/2007/07/strange-bedfellows.html

2.      Banking  – Untrained and unprofessional customer service reps, non-working ATMs over holiday weekends, long queues at bank centers, lousy ‘relationship managers’, spam calls – there is a litany of complaints against most Indian banks and the way they treat their customers.

http://www.complaints.com/2006/november/22/Horror_Exp._with_HDFC_BANK_10047.htm

http://www.mouthshut.com/review/HDFC_Bank-29278-1.html

http://rediff.co.in/getahead/2007/sep/28cards.htm

To end things on a more positive note, I would say that the Telecom, FMCG and Automotive sectors have comparatively been showing much more initiative and maturity in defining good consumer experiences by optimizing the various touchpoints of the experience (pre-sales, sales, service, repeat sales). They also seem to have taken notice of the need for differentiating themselves based on design innovations (Think Swift and Scorpio, Airtel HelloTunes and mCheck payments, think Kurkure and Bingo)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 4:14 pm and is filed under User Experience, Design, India, Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.