Innovation is at the heart of our business. At Tata Communications, innovation is about adding value to our business to enhance our operational excellence and profitability. Therefore, we are focussed on creating incremental innovations, allowing us to provide unique and value-adding advanced services and solutions to our clients.
Innovations lead us to create a strong knowledge system through partnerships with leading companies and external technology players, to provide our customers with the best and most advanced services and solutions. We collaborate with a wide range of ecosystem players, from venture capital (VC) firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Blume Ventures, and others, to other innovation teams like Verizon Ventures, Intel Capital, Tata Steel, disruptive start-ups such as Versa Networks, NS1 among others. We also work extensively with various universities like Harvard, IIT-M, Wharton, Berkley and Harvard etc., to accelerators, and industry bodies (CII, NASSCOM, Telecommunications Council), among others, to drive innovation.
Within Tata Communications, the Corporate Strategy team, the Corporate Venturing, and Innovations Group (CVIG) look after the Open Innovation process. The team has identified 48 innovation initiatives, along with 34 AI initiatives, with a strategic focus. The idea is to create capabilities (products, services, processes, and people) to serve the needs of the future – that is, emerging customer needs, new consumption models, new markets, platforms, and others.
48
Innovation initiatives identified
Partnership-led innovation
We continuously explore multiple innovation themes that are aligned to our short-term as well as long-term business and customer priorities. Innovation themes are derived from the CVIG’s interactions with start-ups, VCs, and accelerators to identify ideas with potential as well as leads given by business units (BUs) on product and operation capability transformation. While the CVIG team manages the start-up scouting and partnership process, the technical and business evaluation process is taken up by product and functional teams.
We follow a methodology that has been specifically designed to manage engagement with start-ups and includes contracting, evaluation, proof of concept (PoC) and commercialisation through an AGILE NPI process with a focus on iterative market fit and scaling. The programme has created 38 strategic partnerships (including both customer-facing and internal deployments).
‘Shape the Future (STF)’ programme
Our STF programme encourages out-of-the-box thinking within the organisation. STF is the flagship programme of Tata Communications with three programmes under its umbrella: STF Disrupt, STF Think-A-Thon and STF Sprints.
STF Disrupt programme
STF Disrupt [erstwhile STF] is the flagship intrapreneurship programme of Tata Communications with a dual mandate of creating new businesses by building new products internally, and of institutionalising entrepreneurial mindsets and an innovation culture within our Company.
STF Disrupt helps the top management to leverage the untapped innovation potential of Tata Communications employees. It provides an idea crowdsourcing platform (in the form of a contest) for employees to share their innovative ideas that can be incubated internally and have the potential to become a US $100 million business eventually. The ideas are put through multiple rounds of evaluation by a cross-functional panel, comprising the CVIG leadership, key product heads, and external advisors, before going to the top management. Winning ideas get incubated to create new product lines (within an existing BU or independently).
Through this, while we are inculcating skills like entrepreneurship and venture building within our Company, we also aim to identify and incubate products that can be revenue-generating under the umbrella of Tata Communications.
The earlier STF programme was rebranded as STF Disrupt in FY 2020-21 under the broader ‘Shape the Future’ programme, and will now run once in 2-3 years to source high-quality disruptive innovative ideas. So far, 12 ideas from such internal challenges have received incubation support from among the 975+ ideas produced by our global employee base for STF Disrupt.
12
Ideas received
incubation support
STF Think-A-Thon programme
The STF Think-A-Thon programme, under the broader ‘Shape the Future’ programme, was launched in FY 2020-21, with the goal of being more proactive about addressing customer-centric problems, and encouraging a culture of problem-solving within a defined time frame. In FY 2021-22, the programme has inspired many customer-facing teams to share their customers’ unmet needs and emerging use cases (problem statements) that the current solutions or processes at Tata Communications do not address.
The problem statements submitted in ‘STF Think-A-Thon’ are deliberated upon by a team of Leadership Forum jury members, and if the problems concern incremental features of an existing product or products in the pipeline, the actionable insights gained from the brainstorming sessions are forwarded to the respective teams for follow up. For problems that require cross-functional and cross-innovation capabilities and have a multiplicative effect on customers, they are picked up for solutions through the programme ‘STF Sprints’. Ideas for solving the problem statements are crowdsourced and a cross-functional team is identified to implement a prototype and subsequent scale-up of the winning idea of ‘STF Sprints’.
STF Sprints programme
In FY 2021-22, we launched a new programme named ‘STF Sprints’ under the ‘Shape the Future’ programme. The programme intends to crowdsource challenges/ problem statements faced by the different business units and inspire employees to submit impactful ideas for those challenges to resolve them. These problem statements are the ones that do not have any obvious solution and would require considerable brainstorming and innovation for resolving the problem statements.
The submitted ideas are evaluated by a jury panel consisting of the senior leadership of Tata Communications and the winning idea(s) prototype is implemented by a crossfunctional team (CFT). Once the functional prototype is built and successful, the BU works closely with the CFT to scale up the prototype for a full-fledged solution.
Tata Communications InnoVista is a unique platform for recognising and celebrating the innovative spirit within the organisation. It tests the ability of our teams to solve real business problems with innovative solutions, with a focus on creating visible impact.
The InnoVista award is given out to innovative projects in the following categories:
Implemented innovation
Piloted technologies
Most innovative partner
Sustainability impact innovations
Dare to try
Design honor
Each of these award categories have different award definitions, eligibility criteria, and evaluation parameters, associated with them. While the award category of ‘implemented innovation’ aims at recognising innovations that have been implemented successfully with demonstrated results and have created an impact on our Company’s key business metrics, the award category of ‘piloted technologies’ looks at recognising global/ industry-first technologies (in the form of products, services, or processes) that have been developed, patented and tested/piloted successfully. There are also award categories like ‘dare to try,’ which aim at recognising failed innovations but that have helped the team gain crucial insights in the learning journey; in addition to another category like ‘most innovative partner’ that recognises partner-led innovations; ‘sustainability impact innovations’ honours projects with sustainable impacts; and ‘design honour’ awards aim to laud projects with innovative design principles.
InnoVista envisions itself as one of our Company’s central enablers for nurturing the enthusiasm of our teams towards innovations and building a sustainable innovation culture.
University partnerships
We work extensively with various universities, such as IIT Delhi, IIT Mumbai, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania, to name a few, to access the domain knowledge and expertise of researchers. We share our research briefs with the alliance managers at these universities, and work with them to identify researchers, working in the identified domains. We also work closely with the legal team to ensure a smooth contracting process, and for sorting out issues related to IP protection, data transfer or data sharing protocols, and data security. The CVIG programme managers constantly review the progress of the project engagements.
The number of problem statements resolved, number of POCs done, contracts signed, and time taken to close the project form the basis on which we measure the success of the external partnership. Terms of order book, revenue generated customers won, and the number of internal-use cases are taken into account post-implementation to evaluate the partnership.
Internal build
Requirements of the customer/partner or a product determine internal build. Productled initiatives are for enhancing an existing product offering/feature or for the launch of completely new products and platforms, and these are driven by the product roadmap or emerging market needs. We gain awareness of these needs through our engagement with our customers or partners. Requests for Proposals (RFPs) or Requests for Information (RFIs) or workshops point towards gaps in our offerings. There are many examples of these across various BUs. For example, BUs can glean requirements from partners such as Microsoft, CISCO, or strategic customers that require working with our Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) partners, and internal engineering teams, in order to enhance the capability of our products and solutions.
