The Centre for India & Global Business was proud to partner with the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) and Blood Orange Media to host a seminar that explored the rise of India and China as both fast-growing global markets and world-class sources of innovation.
Even as the world sinks into a global recession, the Indian and Chinese economies are expected to continue to grow, on the strength of their vast domestic markets. But many Western companies struggle to devise the right business model(s) and marketing strategies that can help them penetrate and succeed in both giant Asian markets. This conference explored the best practices for innovating and winning in the Indian and Chinese markets, and discussed how the globalisation of Indian and Chinese firms are reshaping entire industries – from manufacturing to retail to film and art.
Winning in Emerging Markets: Lessons from the Trenches
Kal Patel, EVP of Emerging Business, Best Buy
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Bollywood Goes Global: Should Hollywood Tremble?
Rohan Sippy, Bollywood Producer and Director
Patrick von Sychowski, Chief Operating Officer, Adlabs Digital Cinema
Allègre Hadida, Lecturer in Strategy, Cambridge Judge Business School
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Branding for China: The Role of Next Generation Consumers
Peter Golder, Professor of Marketing, Stern School of Business, NYU
Kunal Sinha, Executive Director at Ogilvy & Mather Greater China
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Drivers of Success for Market Entry into India and China
Gerard Tellis, Neely Chair of American Enterprise, and Director of the Center for Global Innovation, Marshall School of Business, USC
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How India & China Are Redefining the Global Art Market
Anuradha Ghosh-Mazumdar, Assistant Vice President and Indian Art Specialist, Sotheby’s New York
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India and China: An Inspiration and Source for the Global Luxury Market
Ashok Som, Associate Professor of Management, ESSEC Manish Arora, Leading Indian Fashion Designer
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Inside Consumer India: Challenges for Winning in the Indian Market
Rama Bijapurkar, Leading Market Strategy Consultant, Author & Independent Director
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Sourcing Innovation from Emerging Markets: The Power Of Communities
Peter Williamson, Visiting Professor of International Management, Cambridge Judge Business School
Guruduth Banavar, Director, IBM India Research Lab and Chief Technologist, IBM India / South Asia
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Unleashing the Creative Potential of the Bottom of the Economic Pyramid
Anil K. Gupta, Indian Institute of Management, Co-ordinator, SRISTI and Honey Bee Network, and Executive Vice Chair, National Innovation Foundation
Simone Ahuja, Principal, Blood Orange Media, and Film Director
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What is it that companies can do for these markets to create value, and create wealth for themselves?
This is all about relationships.
And what Reliance did in the partnership with Steven Spielberg is to establish a virtual studio in Hollywood.
Modernising. They are not Westernising.
Guru, thanks a lot for coming to Cambridge to speak at our conference. And thank you also for agreeing to do this interview. What makes India special for IBM? In general, but particularly from an innovation perspective?
India is, indeed, the second largest organisation of IBM overall. Not just the research part of it, but the overall organisation. There is a very vibrant domestic market that IBM wants to get into.
There are a lot of great opportunities for delivering services to our global clients from India, given the amount of talent we have there, and given the amount of capabilities and infrastructure we have there for services. So IBM has decided to strategically invest several billion dollars, in fact, over the next several years to build up that capability and to make it a strategically important cog in the overall IBM wheel.
Understanding the needs of people who have a very different perspective on life, designing technologies and business models around those technologies to address that kind of market is opening some new doors for IBM. The main focus areas that we have for our Indian group, I would say it’s two major areas, emerging mobile solutions, and service delivery technologies. One is how to use the mobile phone as a platform for delivering a whole range of services.
The other major area is, how do we make this idea of global delivery, of services to our vast customer base around the world more effective and more efficient?
During your talk you had told us about Spoken Web. Could you say a little bit about that again?
The Spoken Web is a very special project for us, because it has opened a potentially new opportunity for IBM to enter into these kinds of emerging markets. We have experimented with the Spoken Web now with several small pilots around the country. We think that if we were able to scale this platform to the emerging market scenarios that we’re interested in, we would be able to dramatically transform the kind of IT services that were available to these markets, just like how the regular worldwide web transformed the way the developed world approached IT based services.
Who gets to pay for it? Do consumers pay for it? Do you get other corporates to partner with you in paying for it? Or do governments get involved?
There’s going to be aspects of it that will be provided potentially freely by public service organisations, governments, or NGOs, and so forth. There’ll be aspects of it that will be privately delivered.
People talk about some of the challenges in terms of access to talent. You mentioned not many PhD students coming out potentially from top institutions. Are these challenges for India? And would they have an impact on IBM going forward in terms of innovation?
They are definitely challenges for IBM. And not only for IBM. For the rest of the IT industry. There is a lot of investment in terms of developing the talent. And one example I’ll pick over there is this whole idea of service science that is a key new discipline, we believe, to develop talent for addressing the needs of IBM definitely, but not only IBM for the entire IT industry in India, where we think we need to build the right programmes in academia around the country to generate people who have a deeper understanding of what it means to deliver services and design services so that when they get into the industry, they can be productive from day one.
We’d like to invest more in these kinds of partnerships with institutions to have a long term pipeline that has developed.
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