Case Study - Innovation @ HCL Technologies – Employees at the heart of Innovation Strategy

The only way you can bring innovation to the centre stage of the company to grow faster in the economic turbulent time is to get innovation going at the bottom of the pyramid to employees quoted Vineet Nayar, ex-CEO of HCL Technologies in an interview given to Business Today magazine. HCL Tech is one of the most innovative company in India that relies on innovation not only to help a customer solve a clear business problem but also develop a new way of doing business and create competitive differentiation for both itself and for their clients through innovative ideas. At heart of HCL innovation strategy are its employees and company through its “Employee First and Customer Second” approach channelizes the energies of 90,000 employees and employees develop innovative ideas through collaboration and communication across boundaries as the company has operations in 35 countries. This innovation strategy has helped HCL Tech to grow its revenues and profits during the economic turmoil post 2008 and provide innovative services to their clients. “Innovation is a must-have for service engagements to be more relevant to customers and to grow one’s market share,” Krishnan Chatterjee, vice-president and head, strategic marketing, HCL Technologies told The Telegraph.

Value Portal

HCL Tech believes the ‘value zone’ or the interface between the employee and the customer gives birth to the ideas, innovation and ultimately truly transformational value. HCL’s employee idea exchange platform Value Portal was created to channel the innovative energy of 90,000 employees, specifically grassroots level employees to collaborate, innovate and lead the implementation of their ideas that deliver value to the customers. Collaboration between the employees of HCL and the employees of customer organizations is facilitated through this platform to share knowledge, ideas and solutions to address common goals/problems which resulted in value co-creation. HCL employees were able to deliver ideas, and create value in line with the strategic objectives and direction of the customer’s they were working with and employees got feedback on their ideas and also received rewards once it was implemented in the customer organization.

MAD Jam

HCL Tech employees created the “MAD Jam” (Make a Difference Jamboree) which is a unique celebration of the best innovators of HCL, that demonstrates the HCL tech unique philosophy of  the Employees First, Customer Second’ philosophy. HCLites worldwide sent in over 377 ideas and business heads of the company finalized 18 of the best ideas in the first round and these 18 ideas were made into 3 minute films that showcased the idea and business impact. These videos were shared online on a portal and 18 finalist teams campaigned for their ideas through various channel so as to garner maximum votes from employees and after 2 months, 9 teams made it into the Grand Finale where the ideas were judged by a distinguished panel of judges - two very senior people from HCL, and one external judge, an associate partner from McKinsey. ‘Customer On-boarding’ – a solution that drastically reduces the on-boarding cycle time of a customer in a financial institution - was picked as the winning idea. ‘Mobility Solutions’, which enabled police officers to instantly send details to the central police system from a crime scene, using their mobile devices, was the winner of the Innovators’ Choice award, according to HCL Tech website.

Wikiportal

HCL Tech employees developed Wikiportal to improve sales productivity, by connecting the global sales team with the right information and people within minutes and this portal is developed internally in collaboration with business process re-engineering (BPR) team to develop this application on Microsoft Office Sharepoint (MOSS 2010). Wikiportal allows access to structured and non-structured data through the support of social and collaborative features such as tagging, wikis, blogs, discussion forums, expertise locations, social networks, etc. This led to increase in sales productivity majorly due to streamlining day-to-day business operations; over 80% of our sales force is able to respond to customer queries faster and there is a 35% reduction in cycle time through collaboration while responding to RFPs. Today the Wikiportal has approximately 5000 users across sales and sales support teams, 1.2 million hits in a quarter and 2000 (average) unique visitors in a day, according to HCL Tech website.

Arkmedes

Arkmedes is a platform created by employees to bring together people with similar interests, passion and ideas and created a critical platform of collaboration and innovation within the organization. These communities of passion had indirectly created a robust, self-sustaining knowledge management portal that was driven by the very people who contributed to it on a daily basis and eliminated considerable costs. Today arKMedes has 112 communities with over 24,000 daily visitors, and 3 million hits per year with search volumes of over 2 million, according to HCL Tech website.

Meme

According to HCL Tech website, Meme was built on the concept of “Decoding Individuality” through Connect, Learn ,Share and Grow, this platform featured many standard applications like network of friends and colleagues, tech forums, posts/comments, pictures, tags, document share and group conversations. Since its inception till January 2012, MEME user base grew at around 111% (from 28, 100 employees in April 2011 to 59,185 employees in January 2012). Within the first 4 months of use, over 25000 HCL employees created strong social network connections with each other by creating 521 groups, posting more than 4300 comments and sharing more than 1030 photographs. Today MEME engages around 75000 employees through 2057 groups, 175 pages and 71,568 posts. Through this platform, HCL employees meet the challenge of building effective relationships which are vital to working in large, distributed enterprises.

Co-Innovation Labs

HCL Technologies has developed a strategy called innovative collaboration, where in it collaborates closely with its clients in all the stages of product development through setting up of dedicated labs. Set up two labs in Singapore — the Mobility Experiences Ready to Lead Business Innovation (MERLIN) lab and the co-innovation lab with pharma major Eli Lilly. The lab with Eli Lilly will develop new technologies and solutions specifically for the drug maker.  Through a collaboration process, HCL Tech has developed the ITSE call (Intelligent Transportation System emergency call), a system installed in vehicles that sends an automated text to emergency services when cars meet with an accident. It provides the date and time of the accident and the GPS co-ordinates of the accident location.

Post the 2008 recession there has been a significant change in the Global business environment and the impact is also being felt by the Indian IT vendors who are seeing falling revenue growths and profit margins. Clients no longer expect outsourcing vendors perform simple cost cutting work but are looking for more valuable work that will have significant impact on their business outcomes. Innovation has become an essential part of the strategy for the Indian IT vendors who realized that the best way to bring innovation is to motivate employees and provide them the necessary tools, technologies and platforms for developing innovative ideas, collaborate with colleagues and their clients on those ideas and implement ideas for the benefit of the customers and their own organizations. HCL Technologies have benefited significantly from the grassroots level employee collaboration and idea generation and its philosophy of Employee first and Employee second has also supported the innovation strategy. In 2010, HCL Tech also formed a unit called 'ecosystem and business incubation organisation', which has identified five new ideas like cloud computing, mobility, social media, etc. with potential to become $100 million businesses in three years, and almost $300 million in five years, said Anant Gupta, HCL Technologies. In an interview with ET Now, Vineet Nayar, Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, HCL Technologies Ltd, said “vendors like HCL are winning because of the uniqueness in proposition and constant innovation.”

Discussion Points:

1. What is the role of Innovation in the success of HCL technologies?

2. How do the various tools and platforms adopted by HCL Technologies for Innovation and collaboration promote grassroots level innovation in the company?

3. How the need for Innovation is transforming the Indian IT Vendor’s Organizations?