Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Innovation at Wipro Limited - Case Study: Innovation Clock Since Year 2000
Innovation at Wipro Limited - Case Study: Innovation Clock Since Year 2000
Wipro Intranet Web enabled the whole innovation process and was the place where
employees posted their ideas. Wipro constituted innovation teams, conducted
workshops, and issued innovation process guidelines to all its managers and business
group heads. Wipro set up an Innovation council with five gate ways in all its business
groups. Innovation council consists of CTO and five permanent members whose
responsibility is to evaluate idea and its commercial viability. The five gateways are Idea
gate (idea generation), Evaluation gate (idea screening), Commitment gate (resource
commitment), Development gate (customer order, business plan & projected revenues)
and Volume gate (commercialization of idea). For Wipro Innovation Clock Graphic
please refer to end of the post.
Wipro conducted an Annual event called TechForum where employees present papers
and conduct demos on their ideas. It set up Innovation center in Bangalore that
employed around 200 people in 2003 and provided funds and infrastructure to nurture
innovative ideas and turn them into products. Wipro also set up Centers of Excellence
that are R&D centers for future technological challenges. By 2003 Wipro through these
innovation initiatives have developed innovative products like Flow-Brix, workflow
solutions for publishing, i-Desk, Collaboration tool for HR management, etc.
Wipro and EMC alliance unites Wipro's applied innovation framework for developing new
solutions and services around EMC's industry-leading information
infrastructure technologies to enable more organizations, specifically in targeted growth
markets, to optimize their infrastructures, secure and protect their information, and
leverage their information to unlock its full potential. Wipro and EMC intend to explore
collaboration of industry and application specific solutions in key business areas that
solve customer needs related to storage management, information management,
content management, and information security.
Innovation Evangelism
Pavan Soni defines an Innovation Evangelist in an organizational context as one who
generates awareness of the need to innovate; builds a belief amongst people that
anyone can innovate; and provides sufficient facilitation to enable innovation. At
Wipro Technologies, Innovation Evangelism happens through a series of vehicles that
include: Wipro’s Innovation Camp, Innovation Bazaar, Story Book on Innovation,
Systematic Creativity Workshops, and Inflection Point newsletter, etc. Each of these
started as experiments and then through learning got institutionalized. Key learning are:
enrollment of the stakeholders; creating a semi-structure knowledge sharing
environment; enabling a market of ideas, talent and capital; having a constant and
consistent communication; transparency in operations; and taking a more scientific
approach towards creativity; among others. One of the areas of further investigation is
on measuring the direct and indirect returns of investment for each of these vehicles.
Global Innovation Tournament
Wipro Technologies and Knowledge@Wharton together started conducting this
tournament in 2010 which selects the most innovative managerial "tools" that companies
can use to improve their business by increasing revenues, reducing expenditures and
improving customer experience. The goal of an innovation tournament is to pit
competing opportunities against one another. The judges consistently filter out the
weakest ones until only those with the highest profit potential remain. Karl Ulrich says
the panel judged the innovations on four dimensions: Novelty, Feasibility, Track record
and Overall potential.
The Innovation Tournament is the brainchild of two Penn business school professors,
Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich who authored the book entitled “Innovation
Tournaments:Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities.” The book’s premise is
companies should view and structure the innovation process “as a collection of
opportunities.” After the success of first tournament in 2010 Wipro is conducting the
tournament again 2011.
Discussion points:
1. Is the Innovation strategy adopted by Wipro since 2000 is successful?
2. Wipro has created a culture of Innovation in the organization. Did this culture
generate revenues for Wipro?
3. What is the client’s view of Wipro Innovation culture and how did it work for
them?
4. Will Wipro strategy of collaborating with other IT Vendors like Hardware vendors
and Research Organizations help it in innovation?
Wipro Innovation Clock