Can Indians innovate?

In 1997 Richard Carlson wrote "Don't sweat the small stuff...and it's all small stuff", a slim book with pithy homilies for a less hectic, more meaningful life. I guess the only reason someone had to even tell us not to sweat the small stuff is because we are constantly faced with the stupidity of rules or systems or practices. If you thought minor irritations are just that, I would ask you to think again. They raise our irritation levels, unhinge our otherwise centered self, and cause dangerous elevations in our BP. In short, they can be harmful to life and Carlson knew it.

My title for this blog is deliberately provocative and confrontational. Some of the few who care to read my blogs will doubtless shrug and assume I'm soft in the head. Others will take exception and haul me over the coals. They'll point to Texas Instruments, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, GE, et al and say, "Gee, they're all in India and they have great products, some even developed and patented in India. Indians can't innovate? Go see a shrink!" But that's the point. These are islands where a carefully selected few absorb and practice a culture of innovation that the companies nurture. I am talking of innovation as a commonplace attitude, one we can all see and experience, one that affects us positively in ways large and small. They are embedded in the daily grind of life, in often unobserved situations, in our engagements with people and things. Such innovations are often small, but incredibly powerful. They are lubricants that make life meaningful.

Let me illustrate with a couple examples. Both cases relate to the same underlying issue/problem but in different settings.

I have been visiting Sankara Nethralaya, a specialist eyecare institution of some renown in Chennai, for a couple years now. SN is truly a great organization where the founder, Dr. Badrinath, has evolved a practice that is a world leader in many ways. Their main campus on College Road has an array of specialist care in many buildings on many floors. The volumes are staggering; on any floor - each of these focused on a particular eye ailment such as retinal problems, cataract, etc - an average day sees about 500 patients in the waiting areas at any given point in time. To service this number, SN employs a large number of staff on each floor who record customers with prior appointments, schedule new ones in the future, channel those waiting to the appropriate physicians, shepherd them to diagnostic tests, and so on. It's really a sight for sore eyes.

So what possible complaints could I have? As a customer visiting the premises for two years, I am of the view that the scope for simple innovations is enormous. For instance, the waiting area seats several hundred, each person waiting patiently to be called. Periodically, the staff go around calling out a name. Sometimes, they have to literally go around the whole floor before a patient, seated at the opposite end, hears his/her name being called; at other times, they are missing, perhaps having gone to the basement cafeteria or called it quits altogether, frustrated with the long wait. For a modern, professional, organization this is absurd beyond belief. One would think all this demands is a token dispenser at registration with digital readouts at all places that ring a bell and indicate the token number and the room called to. This could even be multilingual, perhaps even with a digital voice call out. That would be an innovation, quite simple and elegant.

Let's take another example. I have waited many a time at railway booking counters in Bangalore and Chennai. The current system is to have several counters that accommodate any destination and a large number of seats where people, with completed forms, wait their turn for a vacant window. Every time a window becomes available, a person at the head of the "queue" moves to the window and the whole train of people seated in line behind this person then moves one seat. This absurd musical chair game goes on and on until the person who was seated at the very last seat has moved to the head - and changed that many seats - and awaits a window clerk to serve him or her. The scope for innovation in this scenario, as in the case of SN, is laughingly obvious and would obviate any physical movement at all - a digital counter that reads out the token number and the window called to!

Why is it we don't see commonsense practiced in instances like these? It's not as if the staff and management are entirely devoid of intelligence. On the contrary, they are often smart and hard working. It's not about costs either since the expense to implement such ideas are often quite small in relation to the benefits. But the very notion that institutional practices - in the cases above, process redesign - could be altered to accommodate a more efficient system that positively affects customer satisfaction appears to be foreign to most. You may have noticed the melee at most of our bank counters - we know Indians have some kind of congenital problem lining up one behind the other and prefer to crowd around the counter clerk, yet the organizations seem hardly aware of this! Had they been, the solutions are often simple and easy to implement.

In the final analysis, innovation is not about sweating the big stuff and, contrary to Carlson's views, verily involves sweating the small. Often, innovations within an enterprise are incremental and lacking in glamour. Over time, the cumulations of such minor, incremental innovations make organizations super-efficient and often benchmarked. They endear themselves to their customers, get talked about, gain mindshare and marketshare, and emerge top-of-the-class on every metric.

Returning to the title of this blog, the answer, in my opinion, is most assuredly yes. But it demands a culture where every staff member is allowed, and required, to constantly think about their work; where line staff are encouraged to make and adopt good suggestions that improve productivity or customer engagement; and where performance and rewards are closely aligned, monitored, and recognized by management with fairness and speed. It doesn't take much to innovate, but it does call on an organization to commit itself to a culture that encourages it.