Tata group's innovation economic value to cross $1 bn

Tata Group, which has been promoting innovation at its companies over the last few years, expects the combined economic value to cross $1 billion in the current financial year.

"This is the first year we tried to measure the economic benefit of the innovations and for the full year of 2014-15 it is estimated to be $1 billion for 43 innovations that reached the final round of Tata Innovista 2014," Tata Sons member group executive council and brand custodian M Govind Rajan said in Kolkata on Tuesday.

Tata Innovista is an annual event that has been held since 2006 by which the group began capturing and promoting innovations of its companies.

The group, however, measured the economic value of just 43 creative ideas out of 1,700 innovations that took place within the Group last year.

Since 2006, 7,000 innovations have been implemented in the group that included process improvement and new ideas, but earlier it was not measured in economic terms.

"In 2012-13, the group spent around Rs 13,200 crore on research and development activities which was 2.5 per cent of the total revenue. In the current fiscal we expect to maintain a similar share, though numbers are not yet known,"

Rajan said.

Tata Quality Management Services, chief executive officer Sunil Sinha said the group planned to take the innovations drive -- which began under Tata Group Innovation Forum -- to the next orbit, and incubation could be a possibility in future to promote some leading innovations that could have major social impact.

However, there was no final roadmap yet on plans to introduce incubation facility or leading edge innovations in a particular company which could be carved out into a new venture, Sinha said.

"Tata Innovista has become a very good indicator of the success of the innovation drive in the Tata group and of the inherent capabilities of its people. We have observed that almost 70 per cent of participants are in the age brackets of 20-30 and 30-40 years," Rajan said.

Sinha said the most innovative companies in the Tata group included Jaguar Land Rover, Titan, Tata Global Beverage, TCS and Tata Steel.

He pointed out certain interesting points of the programme among the 5.4 lakh workforce in the group.

"An innovation for Titan Industries has come from a employee from Tata Housing," Sinha said.

"It is common that a problem of one company is being put in the Tata group's marketplace where anyone in the group can send ideas to harness the potential of group employees," he said.