Yolynd Lobo

Tata Infotech has instituted a comprehensive process, iGems, for tapping various sources of ideas and evaluating their feasibility for development, reveals Yolynd Lobo in her third article on innovation

When this forum was initially conceptualised, the idea was to focus on examples — good or bad — that we could pick up a few valuable lessons from.

So how do we go from talking about abstract concepts to something concrete? An idea to a product — a conversion that entails financial and management support. Great examples have been seen in 3Ms and IBM. But lets look at something closer to home.

Tata Infotech, a leading system integrator and one of the very few companies in a diverse number of areas, right from consultancy to hardware manufacturer to product development to education services. Its very presence in the information technology arena constantly demands it to keep innovating to be one step ahead of the competition. And Tata Infotech has picked up the challenge and has sought to create iGems.

A comprehensive process, named iGems for Ideas -- Generation, Evaluation and Monitoring System, has consequently been designed to tap various sources of ideas and to evaluate the feasibility of these ideas for development by Tata Infotech. iGems aims to institutionalise innovation.

The main objectives of iGems are to start a movement for innovation, sustain it over a long period, to cultivate creativity as a habit among employees and to reward those who contribute positively towards this movement. A complete strategy has been put in place to identify sources of ideas, ensure the submission of the same through the corporate intranet, study the feasibility of each and make a full-fledged strategy for developing an idea into a product.

The policy also incorporates an attractive incentive scheme for the idea generators, development and marketing team members as well as evaluators and facilitators. Apart from recognising employees as a key source of innovative ideas, iGems is also working on other idea sources through market focus groups and technology focus groups.

Since its launch in November last week, iGems has received an overwhelming response from TIL employees all over India and also from employees posted on assignments abroad. Within the first 14 weeks since its launch, iGems has registered around 140 ideas at a steady pace of 8-12 ideas per week. To evaluate the ideas iGems, has created a pool of around 120 experts from different departments as evaluators and facilitators for the ideas.

One of the key elements of the iGems process is its ability to convert the corporate intranet, generally content based, to an interactive forum for idea generators to submit their ideas, and enable a transparent system of tracking of ideas from the submission stage to the production stage.

Do you have some interesting corporate examples that you would like to share?
Email the author at yolynd.lobo@tatainfotech.com