The Economic times reported the results of an interesting CEO survey.
CEOs believe that Mumbai and Bangalore are India’s cities of the future while Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore (in that order) are India’s most investor friendly cities at the moment.
Patna and Guwahati were perceived to be the most investor - unfriendly cities.
The rankings relatively make sense to me - Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore are arguably the Indian cities most geared and oriented towards global business and global competition. They still retain a strong vernacular flavor but their human resource base has become fairly international and the quality of corporate goods and services continues to improve (despite the absolutely shoddy infrastructure, especially in Bangalore).
However, I also believe that atleast for Bangalore the rising costs, increasing crime, political instability, slipshod infrastructure and absurd and nonsensical rules (like the curfew at 11:30 pm and the ban on dance floors) have made it quite unattractive for the creative class that Richard Florida keeps talking about. If all the interesting people that made Bangalore what it is leave it or become uninteresting, dull and mediocre then I would imagine that Bangalore will quickly lose the branding it has projected to the international business community.
Plus, it would be a darned boring place to live, notwithstanding the mostly congenial weather!
Or maybe its just that I’m recovering from my Mumbai weekend hangover - but more on that in another post.
Via Outlook Business - a somewhat critical view of whether the Barcamp unconference phenomenon in India needs to revisit its entrepreneurial roots to avoid imploding upon itself.
A related article notes notes that events such as proto.in and headstart.in seem to be making more headway because they are more self-selective in nature:
My experience in organizing Dcamp Bangalore last year was that it is indeed difficult to get the balance between top down structuring (which you need a bit of to get the event off the ground) and bottom up collaboration (which is sort of the whole point).
That being said, I remain a firm believer that unconferences (even if somewhat directed) have the potential to start radical conversations, are a very democratic form of dialogue and are evolutionary and emergent in nature - which makes them much more interesting than top down events. Unless of course its something as interesting as the World Debating Championships : - )
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.
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.
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.
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)
Yesterday on my way home I got a call from a certain car dealership company in Bangalore from where I’d purchased my first car. After some small talk on how the car was doing and such, the lady rep on the phone got to the point. Here is how the conversation went:
Rep: Sir, did you receive a customer feedback form from our Delhi office
me: Umm, No
Rep: Sir, when you do could you make sure you rate us 8 out of 10
me: What?
Rep: Sir, the ratings of the Delhi office are really important for us. If you rate us less than 8 it will reflect bad customer service
Me: Umm, O…K, but what if i got bad customer service (which i havent, but what if)
Rep: No problem Sir, you rate us over 8 and come to the showroom - we will fix whatever problem you’ve had with us
Me: Right…ok
At that point the rep hung the phone leaving me puzzled if i were living in some strange Orwellian fantasy world for those 2 minutes!
CKS Consulting recently released the Mobile Development Report. Over the years CKS (formerly the Center for Knowledge Societies) has done some pioneering innovation consulting work focused on emerging economies.
In its signature style, the report notes…”Those seeking to be involved with the coming media revolutions that are bound to unfold in emerging economies such as India would be advised to leave behind the expectation that these regions shall merely come online or replicate industrial societies’ adoption and enthusiasm for the web as it exists today. This will not merely be a web 3.0 or a mobile 2.0. The world of mobile media in India by the end of this decade will be more richly immersive, multiply-mediated and nuanced, through subtle forms of gesture, moving, growing, shifting and changing at the rate of sociality itself.”
Will Value Added Service providers, and telecom providers wake up and develop meaningful, contextual, relevant applications and services for the large semi urban and rural consumer base in India?
From a recent IxDA post, I found some good references for US salaries of Interaction Designers and Usability Engineers. The salary ranges show a skew which would disappoint most opponents of the labor arbitrage angle of outsourcing - On an average, designers and usability professionals in America make an average of $65000 whereas their Indian entry level counterparts in blue chip product or services organizations are still paid somewhere in the $10000 to $15000 range.
This makes me wonder - If MBAs coming out of India are now being paid extremely competitive salaries since they form the backbone of business success, why are designers not paid more money than say, the average Quality Assurance Analyst, or the average template-driven software developer who’s hacking together a bunch of APIs lifted from the web. Didn’t Bruce Nussbaum note not too long ago in Business Week– “When people talk about innovation in this decade, they really mean design”.
If business innovation is essentially about design innovation, why are designers not considered at par with business professionals? For those interested in some number comparisons, check out the following links:
I recently caught Kevin Cheng’s interesting interview on communicating concepts with comics. Kevin is a Senior Interaction Designer at Yahoo and has been using comics as a technique to bring forth the richness of design scenarios.
Reading this interview, i wondered - Can Indian comics be used to develop richer scenarios for designing more relevant technology products for Indian markets? Could all those Amar Chitra Katha and Indrajal Comic readings indeed be of help in understanding how say, a migrant rural population might adopt touchscreen computers?
One of Prof. Sadagopan’s columns in i.t. magazine titled ‘As I see IT’ is very interesting from a trending perspective. Every issue, the article lists important trends in the tech economy, such as — number of mobile subscribers, graduating tech student salaries, the presence of Indian tech companies in top 10 lists of ‘something notable’, recent IT acquisitions, and the like.
However, whenever I get a chance to read through SS’s latest pot pourri of statistics (and I labor under the questionable assumption that the tech economy is an indicator of India’s overall success), I ask myself the question ‘Am I a natural pessimist about India or a cautious optimist’. After reading the article I find two conflicting voices in my head – one says that India is unquestionably headed in a better direction, and another feels that all these lists of achievements mean something only to the elevated and temporarily-sedated -with-retail-therapy middle classes and not the ‘great unwashed masses’ as a philosopher once called them.
That being said, India turns 60 on August 15 this year and despite being a cautious optimist, i feel quite happy to be part of this moment in spacetime. : -)
After a 6 week hiatus from blogging, i’m finally back. Some of the most surreal moments in the past month were spent in the moonscapes, sand dunes (yes!), snow peaks, winding roads, and rarified mountain air of Ladakh.
I suspect i’m still down with what a writer once called the Post-Mountain Syndrome, where city life (and especially life in the tech sector of Bangalore) appears to be like a pale shadow of a shadow of the exhilaration I experienced walking through, being driven through and simply being in the mountains.
I should have the pictures of my Ladakh trip up on Flickr soon
I am a generally happy Airtel customer. I’ve used their landline, broadband, and mobile services for a couple of years now and I’m always happy to report Airtel generally as a world class customer experience - especially at those times when broadband woes strike in the middle of the night. I would rate my experience with Airtel’s call center agents higher than with any of their counterparts in the financial services industry (Citibank take note).
However, there is one interesting and somewhat perplexing feature of Airtel’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system for phone based bill payments (using credit cards) that is disconcerting. And its not only the booming voice, a point well noted by Shruti Bhandari in her blog post. It is the cognitive dissonance caused by listening to a Frankenstein voice - one mixed with distinctly Western, North Indian and South Indian English accents. Now the individual voices are in themselves not a problem. What causes my hair to stand on end is that the voice which validates your 16 digit number or phone number alternates between the Western sounding and Indian sounding voice. Imagine hearing 3 being read in a stern Western tone and 7 being read in a soft South Indian tone. By the time the entire number is read out, I have to say “creepy…”
I wonder how Airtel missed this. The booming mixed-locution voice almost sounds like Airtel picked up a few Western style number intonations from an old IVR system, got one of their agents to record the other numbers, and then cobbled the whole thing together with some duct tape.
That strange locution apart, I love the IVR - saves me and them the trouble of hunting for each other when its bill payment time every month.
That said, why doesn’t India’s fledgling technology products and services industry pay more attention to these simple aspects of consumer experience? Anybody remember the nightmare of dialing the Indian Railways number (139) and having to dial about fifty times before someone actually picks up the phone…..
