February 21, 2012: The growth of the outsourcing industry in India has been exceptional with growth happening every year. Beginning with providing IT professionals’ onsite work, the industry now serves leading companies across the world. The industry has now matured into a position where it can offer innovative solutions to enterprises. Offshoring to India increased with the outset of economic crisis in the developed counties and it created a pool of talents in the area of Information Technology.
Innovation gained importance among the service providers as more and more clients were increasingly becoming interested in innovation. Clients are ready to pay more for innovative solutions and about 41 per cent of the clients say that Indian service provider’s lack innovation. Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro are well known in the area of innovation. These companies make use of intranet, and other means to engage with employees and bring out their ideas. TCS and Infosys have in place their own innovation labs which have brought about different innovative solutions and platforms.
As part of the agenda to promote innovation in India, National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has declared the winners of the Innovation Awards 2012. The four companies which topped in the list were felicitated by Minister of State for Commerce and Industry, for their distinguished contribution to the Indian Information Technology and Business Process Outsourcing sector. The award in its 8th year identifies and acknowledges organizations that have added innovation as a part of their strategy that lead to the introduction of innovative products and services.
A new category of award was also introduced in the current year- ‘Social Innovation: Market Facing’. The evaluation was made by an expert panel of judges which included industry experts, academicians and analysts through a rigorous process. The experts were selected from across various industries such as BFSI, telecom, and Utilities.
The organizations were short listed based on innovation in different areas such as technology, scalability of the model and number of patents applied by the contesting organization.
In the domain of New Technology Advancement, the winner was Cisco Systems India Private Limited and the second position was held by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC). The new technology advancement comes under the product category.
In the area of Market Facing Innovation, the first position is held by HCL Technologies Limited and the second position is held by Logica India Private Limited. In the new category introduced this year, i.e. social innovation, SCOPE International Private Limited emerged as the winner. Market Facing Innovation comes under the Process Category.
Internal Process Innovation is another area where the winner for 2012 for the category was Ericsson India Global Services Private Limited and the second position was held by Global Business Services, HP.
The service providers in the Indian outsourcing industry have realized that innovation is highly important for their survival in this competitive and dynamic market. As a result many of them have invested huge amount of resources including money and men in order to drive innovation.
