At NASSCOM Innovation Summit

I attended the NASSCOM Innovation Summit in Bangalore last month, where I presented our Bridgestone work. It went off well, and though results are awaited, I am pretty confident we will pull it off :)

Here's something from the NASSCOM reporter covering the event on it's EMERGE blog:

Next in line we have an interesting speaker who opened the talk with “Tyre as a Service“. It was a welcome change given we had heard SaaS, IaaS, PaaS all through. The tone was rightly set to highlight the innovation they did in business process and in business model but for their client. They on their own still operate like a technology services company.

Siddhesh Bhobe of Persistent Systems presented the change they brought in BridgeStone, a global leader in tyre industry. The problem they solved was to get rid of the lethargic and ineffective tyre servicing of trucks. BridgeStone guaranteed their customers to provide this service and used to pair up with service centers to provide the same facility for which they had to pay upfront. Persistent Systems came up with a mobile based solution levaraging RF tracking to completely remodel the way the servicing was done at the service centers. The synchronised tracking and update has also enabled BridgeStone to move to a pay-per-service model.

In a very compact and user friendly application they have enabled viewing and updating history about the tyres - age, miles driven, damages and repair etc. Additionally all tyres are trackable by just walking at a close distance. Apparently in cold weather this improves productivity a lot as the mechanics don’t have to make multiple trips back and forth to measure and note down their findings. Given a extensive history of the tyre is collected this helps BridgeStone in optimizing their internal processes. In all BridgeStone focus has moved from ’selling tyres to servicing tyres’, enabled a direct B2C relation than the earlier B2B.

Though their high involvement into a client’s problem and delivery are exceptional, what was little unexpected was that they did not deliver on a business-value delivery model but rather for the technology development. Again, though this was highly impressive, the innovation was still about enabling innovation for a client than innovating for themselves. At this point it dawns on me that the “Market Facing” in the Innovation Award series is stressed more than I thought. On a personal opinion I think we in India should gradually also focus on innovation at core than enablement (a services model which has always existed).

The jury seemed to quite impressed by the presentation and the Q&A sessions did not have anything much to add.

The slide deck used for the event can be accessed here.