Yes, you read that right.
Much as the common man might find it difficult to believe, there’s innovation in IT Services companies and IT Services companies do get patents.
The über boss of India’s largest IT company lashed out at detractors of the IT Services industry, and pointed out that:
- Indians should be celebrating an industry that has grown from nothing to US$ 150 billion in revenues in 30 years
- India should be doing more in an industry that is clearly aligned with its strengths
- There’s huge headroom for growth in IT Services.
I couldn’t agree more with Mr. N Chandrasekharan, who was until recently the CEO of India’s largest IT company Tata Consultancy Services and, in January, became the Chairman of TCS’ holding company and India’s largest business conglomerate Tata Group.
That said, India’s IT Services industry faces growing competition from Brazil, Central Europe, China and other wannabe-offshore destinations. Therefore, it’s necessary for the industry to think of new ways to maintain its lead.
One way of doing that is to innovate and create Intellectual Property.
Innovation and IP are generally associated with product companies.
IT Services supposedly comprises mundane work and offers little scope for innovation and IP.
I totally disagree with the popular narrative.
In my experience of over two decades in the IT Services industry, I have regularly:
- Found nuggets of true innovation in many projects. Just that they never came to light because they didn’t float the project team’s technical boat
- Packaged services innovations in ways that fully safeguarded the IP rights of customers.
But it’s hard for IT Services company insiders to spot innovation and leverage IP because of a few factors:
- Programmers and Project Leads working on a project get excited about some new facet of technology or programming language they’ve used in their project. Automatically, they tout that as innovation. But, when viewed against the prism of market, most their claims fall flat
- Project Managers / Delivery Managers responsible for the project are not very enthusiastic about uncovering innovation in their projects. Their apathy stems from the belief that, since source code developed in a services project belongs to the customer, they can’t use the IP, even if they find it
- Near universal belief among everyone that innovation = technology.
To unlock innovation and IP, it requires an “outside-in” perspective.
We use the following structured methodology to help IT Services companies identify and monetize innovation and IP:
- Discover capabilities by deep-diving into projects
- Create marketable offerings that are centered around resolution of business pain areas related to revenues, costs, risks, and so on
Use our proprietary STRADOF framework to identify differentiators like domain expertise, dedicated practice groups, engagement models, optimum size, hosting infrastructure, etc.- Develop case studies and offering detail notes
- Spec proof-of-concepts
You can find more details and success stories at GTM360 for IT Services Companies.
If you need help with identifying and monetizing your services innovation, we’re there!