in a Dynamic Environment - Tata Consultancy Services

new Frontiers
From the formative decades of the 1970s and 1980s when the global IT
Services industry was disrupted by the notion that work could be done
remotely from places like India, TCS’ innovation has been defined by its
investment in building tools and solutions that accelerates software
development for customers and enables its professionals to deliver high
quality of services from off-shore locations.
During the Company’s growth phase in the 1990’s and the early part of
this decade, innovation agenda at TCS focused on enabling the
organisation to cope with bigger scale and global expansion as it grew
rapidly in size and reach. Over the last five years, innovation in the
Company has been closely linked with building thought leadership in
the global market place through creation of new solutions and
technologies as well as building an innovation ecosystem around the
TCS Innovation Labs through partnerships with universities, start-up
companies and other technology companies.
Within the organisation, the Research and Development organisation
aligns itself closely to support TCS’business objectives. There is also an
innovations go-to-market team that supports our sales teams to win
new business. The Industry Solution Unit interface works on creating
solutions based on R&D from the Innovation Labs and our Co-
Innovation (COIN) partners. Co-Innovation comes alive for our
customers in ’Co-Innovation Days’held for each strategic customer.
There is a separate incubation group – an in-house venture capital firm,
focusing on big bets of the future from ‘Inception to Implementation’.
This initiative has made good progress with solutions and services in the
areas of advertising ecosystems, mobile value-added services and digital
devices. The Corporate Tools group promotes the use of tools and
enables our business units to deliver continuously improving
productivity and quality of services to our customers.
14 | TCS Annual Report 2008-09
Internally, several initiatives are held on an ongoing basis to fosterTCS’
culture of innovation. The TCS Top10 coding challenge, which was
open to associates across organisational units in the enterprise,
created a buzz among programmers in every region and geography.
Web 2.0 platforms such as JustAsk and IdeaMax were deployed to
capture tacit knowledge as well as innovative ideas within the
enterprise and were eagerly adopted.
This year has been a watershed year with respect to Intellectual
Property (IP) creation in TCS. We have redefined our IP strategy with a
view to building a stronger portfolio for future monetisation,
collaboration and risk mitigation. We have been granted 42 patents so
far in multiple country jurisdictions, and another 190+ are in various
phases of approval.
TCS’ innovation has been widely recognised on the global stage. TCS
Mobile Agro Advisory Solution “mkrishi” won the Wall Street Journal
Innovation Technology Award for 2008 in the wireless category and
the Golden Peacock Innovation Award. US-based publication
Infoworld ranked TCS’ Global Certainty IdeaStorm in its list of Top 100
Innovative IT Projects. Many of the Company’s researchers and
Scientists have won individual laurels and awards.
The Company’s R&D organisation has grown and has more than
doubled the number of PhDs. TCS’ R&D has attracted top talent from
notable universities across the world and its research internship
program brings interns from many world class universities to the labs.