S Ramadorai, global CEO and managing director of TCS, said the company would promote the TAFE courses in the country and also provide them in local languages.

TAFE NSW is the largest vocational education and training provider in Australia

“TCS and TAFE are working together on a detailed business plan,” he said.

The alliance would be a first for both parties, and comes after the Premier of Australia’s New South Wales state, Morris Iemma, visited India recently. Ramadorai said he and other senior executives had fruitful discussions with Iemma, who led a delegation of 70.
Ramadorai said the company was actively looking to acquire Companies in Australia that would improve its portfolio.
Work was also under way to develop an innovation lab in Sydney to showcase next-generation banking technologies, he told the Australian.

Ramadorai could not reveal investment figures but said the facility would be ready in six to nine months, starting with a core team of 10.

Apart from Sydney, TCS would launch an embedded systems facility in Tokyo in February and a Microsoft centre of excellence in Beijing in the second quarter of 2008, he said. TCS has 20 innovation labs around the globe. Solutions showcased at the labs are implemented by customers the world over. Australia’s largest retailer Woolworths has been a beneficiary.

“Smart Store is the name of the TCS Retail innovation lab in Chennai, India, where we provide demos of the various solutions for global retail customers,” Ramadorai said.

He could not provide specifics, citing a confidentiality agreement with Woolworths. TCS’s relationship with the local retailer goes beyond IT services.
Last year, parent company Tata Group formed a partnership with Woolworths to open 30 electronics superstores in India.
TCS senior management was in Sydney recently to meet customers and potential clients to espouse the virtues of innovation in business.

Since the Rs 9,000-crore biscuit market witnessed a growth of 20% last year and is slated to sustain its growth this fiscal, ITC is looking at enhancing its biscuit manufacturing capacities by at least 15-20%, primarily to manage supply chain costs and improve profitability. “We plan to set up additional capacities in such areas where we have developed a significant front-end scale, but are limited by proximate capacities. Attempts are being made to create new biscuit variants in segments that are relevant to the consumer. The positioning of the marketing mix is also being worked upon to drive consumption by creating convenient price points or by differentiating product propositions,” Mr Chitranjan Dar, chief operating officer, ITC Foods Division, told ET.

For starters, ITC plans to drive growth by vitalising its brand ‘Sunfeast’ through product innovation, contemporary packaging and targeted brand communication. A huge investment is also being planned for brand building and product development. At the same time, the company is looking at investments in building trade loyalty across channels and markets.

Elaborating further, Mr Dar said, “while ITC per se has no plans to rationalise its biscuits portfolio, we review the basket from time to time. Additions or deletions takes place on the basis of the market feedback and actual sales. The idea is to strengthen the winners and replace the average performers with potential winners from the biscuits stable. As of now, there is no product which does not contribute positively to the overall pool of contributions.”

Incidentally, a large proportion of the growth in the biscuits segment is coming from the mid-price offers growing at 35%. The mid-price offers is the non glucose segment and includes cookies and sandwich cream products.

“There are clear indications that consumers are upgrading to mid-price offers in line with the growth of packaged foods in the country. Since consumers are ready to pay for good quality and tasty products, we find a growing value for product quality and hygiene. Hence, our capacity additions will partly be in line with these requirements Mr Dar pointed out. The basic product glucose, however, continues to be largest category in terms of volumes.

‘eKOCool’, a chest cooler, developed internally by the Indian arm of the Atlanta based multinational, operates exclusively through solar energy, with no other electricity source required to operate it. It has a capacity to store two crates, which contains 48 glass bottles of 300ml each. That’s not all. It can even charge your mobile phone and light up your home.

The innovation gives Coca-Cola a competitive edge to tap new rural markets and ramp up sales of a product which is always best served chilled. Introduced in select rural markets earlier this summer, it has already improved sales dramatically and company officials expect orders of the product from other countries in the system as well.

Says Asim Parekh, VP technical, Coca Cola India: “The eKOCool is an outcome of our technical team’s persistence to use renewable energy for operating cooling equipment. The rural markets pose challenges in expansion as a huge swathe of the rural belt is not yet covered by the power grid hence remains without electricity or has low power. This challenge has now been overcome by Coca-Cola’s new innovation, which will give us a competitive edge as well as a first mover advantage.”

The product loaded into the cooler early morning or previous night is ready to be served chilled in the morning. The cooling equipment brings benefits to the retailer too in terms of saving on the electricity bill and cost of ice.

A pilot project under which 20 such coolers were placed in rural areas near Agra (Uttar Pradesh) has been successfully completed this summer, and has already shown results. Sales from these outlets have jumped nearly five times, a company official said.

Sakhidevi, who operates a general store in Sarvatpur near Agra, says: “We don’t have electricity in the village for hours. Since I installed the solar cooler, my sales have gone up.”

The journey to develop the solar cooler started in May 2009, when Coca Cola India CEO Atul Singh was visiting a rural market in UP and found that many outlets stocking the company’s products did not have any chilling equipment. The outlets were operating out of ice boxes with little ice, since either coolers or electricity were not available.

Says Sunil Gulati, GM Technical, who developed the design; “After evaluating various options, we chose solar energy to eliminate the need to depend on grid-based electricity completely, and to be environment friendly.”

What Zipcar and Live Ops share in their achievements, Girotra and Netessine say, is not some breakthrough in their services but rather innovation within their business and operating models. These companies differentiated themselves from their competitors through innovative business models, instead of focusing purely on product or technology innovation. They offered existing services to existing customers using existing technologies, but using a different operating model.

“There’s creativity in coming up with new products and there’s creativity in coming up with new business models,” Girotra says. “You can invent new products, but to really realize the value it is important to organize and create the right business model around that.”

Two popular companies did exactly that: The Spanish clothing retailer Zara designed a hyper-fast supply chain to deliver new lines of clothing in two to four weeks, allowing the company to keep abreast of evolving, arguably fickle consumer preferences. Technology superstar Apple created an ecosystem that included not only technology and product innovations but also a whole range of complementary software services. The challenge with business-model innovation lies in identifying where and how to make changes. Too often companies focus on improving revenues, costs and resource utilization, but completely ignore the risks associated with the business.