Rajaram Venkataraman - Innovate or Die

Mr. Rajaram Venkataraman, chief innovation Architect, Infosys talked on the topic of process innovation and the role of ICT (the innovation wing of Infosys).He started by giving some statistics on how many companies survived the test of time. Only 2 stood out from the Forbes list of top 100 companies in 1917. Only 12 companies remained liquid out of S&P's list of 500 companies in 1957. All the rest in both the above cases went out of business.

He mentioned the cliched saying "the only thing that is constant is change" and connected it to the philosophy of Infosys to adapt to change. Change is directly related to the market conditions, the products/services one offers and the complexity of the business. He discussed the constant, consistent innovation throughout the organization which he termed as "diffused innovation". He brought out his points very clearly by discussing the case study of Toyota, a company that mastered the art of innovation and which is the creater of several key industry practices in today's business world. "The best never rest!" is the guiding mantra for them. He beifly discussed the innovation done by great names like Wal-Mart, DHL, Zara, Tirupati queuing and the Tata Nano.

He elaborated on Infosys' innovation  practices and the kind of business units that have been created to cater to innovation. He spoke about the GDM, PSPD modelling, ESOPs, the campus style environment and the famed SPARSH portal that provided a fertile ground for the seeds to innovation to germinate into business ideas.

He also gave the students an idea of what is going to come in the future times. The audience were left fascinated by the endless possibilitis of innovation in the fields of SAAS, PAAS, Cloud computing, SAP/Orale based transformation in businesses.