India Inc.: A Lesson in Business Design

Ambitious, resourceful, and unencumbered by convention, India offers the world a dramatic demonstration of business design

By Heather Fraser

As a delegate to a Mumbai conference of the Association of Indian Management Schools (AIMS) in August, I had a chance to engage in an important meeting of the minds. Hosted at the Welingkar Institute of Management, participants included business school educators from across India along with industry leaders from companies such as ICICI, Aditya Birla Group, and Pfizer (PFE). The conference focused on the importance of grooming a new generation of "business creators" to lift the country's collective prosperity and position India competitively in the global marketplace.

What stood out was the collective ambition to radically reinvent models for India and the world. While not above the challenges of the current crisis, India offers the West an important source of inspiration. While there is no doubt India has its own special market conditions, there are some business design principles that everyone should consider.

Practice the Rule of 10%
Embracing constraints as a source of creativity, resourcefulness, and ingenuity may very well be India's greatest advantage. The "10% rule"—delivering goods and services to the marketplace at 10% of the Western world's average price—could drive accessibility and competitiveness to a whole new level. Aravind, for instance, set out to eradicate needless blindness despite the challenges of limited resources, remoteness, and poor clientele. Through establishing a research institute, a network of hospitals and training centers, sourcing of affordable ophthalmic products, and effective delivery mechanisms, Aravind is now able to provide expert service to those who have historically lacked access. Today Aravind is the largest provider of eye care in the world, examining over 1.7 million patients and operating on 250,000 patients annually. Instead of assuming big budgets and building from current economic equations, we must lower the starting point or even zero-base future-forward development projects more often.

Broader Platforms for Collaboration
Go beyond "interdepartmental collaboration" to pursue more joint ventures and cross-institutional collaborations. EDUSAT is an excellent example of an open source initiative that uses technology to pool resources for collective gain. Built and launched by the Indian Space Research Organization, EDUSAT is the first Indian satellite built to exclusively serve the education sector across India. EDUSAT creates a central hub for knowledge and resources that benefits everyone, regardless of physical location. By giving educational institutions of all levels across the country access to this central resource, they can access knowledge, curriculum, experts and interactive distance teaching tools that will extend the reach of education to every corner of India. The successful launch of EDUSAT also demonstrates the country's end-to-end capability in establishing space systems to undertake large-scale application programs for the benefit of the society. Imagine how much redundancy we would eliminate and costs we could cut out if we shared resources more broadly more often.