TCS is driven by a persistent desire for innovation, underpinned by the ability to draw from innate human curiosity and experiment with ideas purposefully. Our Research and Innovation vision was established on founder CEO Faqir Chand Kohli’s core belief—“all domains of knowledge must be pursued because at some stage of design, development, or manufacturing, computers would be involved”.
TCS’ Agile Innovation Cloud (AIC), a framework for operationalizing innovation in an enterprise setting to ensure innovation does not happen by chance but by design, reflects the sole purpose of TCS PaceTM which is to bring together the best of TCS’ innovation, global capabilities, and talent to deliver accelerated outcomes.
AIC helps customers build strategy by identifying disruptors and opportunities; create an innovation portfolio; and scale innovation.
Why an innovation portfolio
Discontinuing ineffective innovations early can save about 50% or more of the allocated budget. We make sure to trim our clients’ innovation portfolio before they make expensive investments that are likely to go nowhere. Our role is to ask the difficult questions that our partners’ internal team may be unwilling or incapable of addressing.
Our culture of innovation plays a key role in bringing in a comprehensive and international perspective on innovations that can also be transferred from one market to another.
We also factor in the following tenets in our approach as these often go unaddressed in an organization’s transformation strategy:
- The single largest predictor of the success of a new product is a differentiated high value product or service offer.
- Yesterday’s technology often needs rapid replacement—set goals for a percentage of revenues and profits recent products or services are expected to yield.
- Experiential marketing is not just a product design decision, but a competitive strategy. Websites, touchpoints, pricing, interactions—these need to be upgraded to support the end-user’s experience.
- Consumers’ decisions to purchase are influenced by reviews and social networking, even while being far removed from each other in the physical world.
- Changing an organization’s culture to support a new business model is likely to be resisted. The culture, the people, the incentives, and the IT systems often conspire to deter innovation.
- Transformations that move slower than changing customer needs lead to revenue failure.
- Most technology is complex for customers and prospects. Building a technology without the experience of customers’ needs and usage is the strongest predictor of innovation failure. Quick learning and building a minimum viable product (MVP) in an agile environment are the requisite solutions to an unknown customer and needs of an emerging or new customer.
- Innovation is no longer centered in the developed economies. Competitors in developing markets often innovate and develop extremely low-cost solutions, something difficult to conceive in higher cost countries.
- Companies rarely pursue just one innovation. Explicitly managing a portfolio of innovations allows a company to sequence the current and future demands of the business.
In essence, we help bring our clients’ growth and transformation strategies to life before they commit and make expensive investments.
