Think innovation first!

Posted by Pankaj Mittal | Sep 27, 2010 |

Having kick started my blog by talking about the power of the idea, I am tempted to continue in the same vein and reiterate my passion for innovation, which I believe will be the major change agent for all of us going forward.

As someone who has been involved in several initiatives at Impetus on new and emerging technologies and the creation of �freshest products first,� I firmly believe this to be true�that it is the innovators within industry that will survive and thrive.

What completely excites and engages me is the concept of building a culture of innovation, where innovation is imbued in the DNA of a company and where the people are actually committed to thinking and working creatively, by taking the unbeaten path. The way I see it, innovation must not only be harnessed to change the internals of an organization�through better processes, evolved best practices, improved IP creation strategies and skill building�it should also be used to transform the business of the client, and all other external stakeholders. By leveraging innovation, we must create higher and higher value for our customers, where the impact on their businesses is profound.

I am tempted to talk about the innovative work that we are doing in the area of product testing, to elucidate my point. Over the year, we have truly attempted to think �out-of-the-box� to ensure that our product testing services remain state-of-the-art and help companies deal with their most complex challenges. By developing cutting-edge tools, components and Frameworks in the area of testing, we have remained cutting-edge and extremely relevant to product developers.

At a time when the market is demanding products that are of extremely high quality and within shorter life cycles, we have introduced a completely path-breaking approach called the Test Engineering Maturity Model (TEMM), which provides definite direction and right set of testing activities to attain higher RoI with respect to business goals, quality, cost and time. The activities and associated best practices are arranged in four levels that serve benchmark for any type of testing.

At the same time, we have also developed the Test 360,� an integrated toolset and bunch of practices based on proven product testing patterns, that provide a platform for mature software product testing. Test360� uses Open Source testing tools and provides a platform that integrates with licensed testing tools, interoperates with existing investment in testing tools and uses the adapt, rather than replace approach.

For Impetus to remain a thought leader in the segments where it plays, each one of us must contribute to the innovation cause. One way of doing this is by altering our thinking from �what is,� to �what can be.� And also ensuring that while incremental innovation should aim at making a �daily difference� one must always also be on the lookout for making that leapfrogging jump every once in a while. I�ll talk more about the approaches and application of such thinking some other day...

2 Comments for this post

Posted by Ramu Iyar | Dec 10, 2010

Having kick started my blog by talking about the power of the idea, I am tempted to continue in the same vein and reiterate my passion for innovation, which I believe will be the major change agent for all of us going forward. As someone who has been involved in several initiatives at Impetus on new and emerging technologies and the creation of "freshest products first," I firmly believe this to be true- that it is the innovators within industry that will survive and thrive.

What completely excites and engages me is the concept of building a culture of innovation, where innovation is imbued in the DNA of a company and where the people are actually committed to thinking and working creatively, by taking the unbeaten path. The way I see it, innovation must not only be harnessed to change the internals of an organization- through better processes, evolved best practices, improved IP creation strategies and skill building- it should also be used to transform the business of the client, and all other external stakeholders. By leveraging innovation, we must create higher and higher value for our customers, where the impact on their businesses is profound.

In order for Impetus for embed "innovation in its DNA," it has to vector along a go-to-market strategy that builds cobranded offerings for each customer that focuses on value co-creation and embedding "shared innovation in the DNA of Impetus and its revenue-paying customer." This will be true differentiator unlike Impetus' competitors.

For example, how about owning the Testing process of an onshore company and raising the process maturity level from Level 1 up the continuum. Since there is a Wall Street focus, may be you can also calibrate the SEI maturity model in decimal points as opposed to integer based (non-baby) step functions. The measure and manage approach has to be communicated by onshore resources on the ground to the revenue-paying customer to mitigate any relationship management or competitive positioning risks. This may be a point that is already being addressed by the Impetus value creation model.

A probing question for consideration is whether the Webinar model is truly scalable for becoming a defacto thought leader, for example, in the SaaS space. There are other larger SaaS competitors such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google who may have a different value prop than Impetus. The question is whether an India based player who has a zipcode presence in an onshore setting (San Jose) is sufficient for becoming a thought leader aside from proven successes by a (handful) of Impetus customers. I cherry pick "Webinar" because in a browser environment for interacting with the company (Impetus), there are 2 things that are happening:

(1) The competition (Amazon, Microsoft, Google or other) is only a click away;
(2) The Webinar is a high tech, low touch approach.
So can you really get true mindshare without being inside a CxO office? May be your biz dev process is already an oiled machine to address this point as well.

In order for Impetus to to the Innovate cause, we have to go back to the point that I opined at the outset of this blog response. It is that the crucial conversation entails in understanding the business problem of the prospective customer and turning that in an ongoing dialogue so that you capturing the voice of customer and delivering value with agility by leveraging continuous engineering processes that outsmart the revenue-paying customer competitors the subtle point is that Impetus is not thinking about its competitors (one dimensional) but has a multi-dimensional view of the customer in order to enable the revenue-paying customer to rapidly cross the chasm.

Hope this helps.

Ramu
http://twitter.com/ramu_atm

Posted by Pankaj Mittal | Dec 10, 2010

I appreciate your comments and they are indeed helpful. Co-creation with customers is our key value proposition and you are right, it really helps instill the culture of innovation at all levels. We do not necessarily co-brand our offering, but thats a good thought to take forward.

The aim of our TEMM and Test360 approach is to do exactly what you have statedown the entire process of testing and keep enhancing it incrementally. The maturity model drives the direction of improvements required while the Test360 framework helps implement the Best Practices and processes required for development.

I would like to point out that the Webinar is just one of the many ways available and practiced by us to communicate our thoughts about any subject, business model, technology, concept, etc. Our Research and Development, and Engineering groups are playing a major role in not only creating unique IP, Frameworks, products and technologies, but also actively talking about them in various public and industry forums. We have been consistently demonstrating our offerings at various global exhibitions and speakers representing Impetus have been presenting keynotes and participating in panel discussions at these reputed conclaves. I myself have been addressing audiences across the world, in an attempt to gain mindshare for Impetus and establish our thought leadership in specific areas. The results have been very encouraging.

Take Big Data and Hadoop for instance. We already have built considerable expertise in HPC and Cloud services, creating thought leadership within this domain through pools of subject matter experts and skill sets in areas such as Very Large Data Processing, Multi-core, Parallel, Distributed Computing, Hadoop, Programmable hardware, and the HPC 360 degree solution.

In fact, late last year, we even hosted the first ever Hadoop User Group Meet, in Noida, to increase awareness about Hadoop and HPC and establish our thought leadership in the area. The meet provided a platform for the leaders of the Hadoop developer and user communities to discuss the developments taking place within this space and share their experiences with Apache Hadoop/Hbase/Hive/PIG/Nutch/etc.

The fact is that we may not become de facto thought leaders in some of these. We follow the co-creation or value-added partnership model with various established thought leaders as you mentioned. We share a podium with them and that adds to our thought leadership image. I firmly believe that a good work always speaks for itself no matter from where it originates. One needs to be aware and effectively harness various ways and means of reaching our target audience and influencers.

I appreciate and agree with your view that the key is to provide asymmetric advantages to our customers so that they can leapfrog. The recipe I believe is to work as a strategic partner to customers with great sense of ownership, agility, excellence and of course innovation.

Regards
Pankaj Mittal

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