Thrive & grow: Innovation most essential for business resilience and recovery

By Srinath Srinivasan

It is evident by now that innovation and technology are quintessential to survival in the post-pandemic world. Companies have rapidly taken steps to innovate in terms of technology, processes and people. The usage of digital tools to manage businesses has also gone up significantly.

In a study conducted by IDC and Microsoft, it was found that 77% of Indian companies have found innovation to be critical to their performance and resilience. Further, the study says that the pandemic has accelerated the evolution towards innovation, with companies in India maturing by 4% in their journeys over the last six months.

Altogether 3,312 business decision makers and 3,495 workers from companies with more than 250 employees across 15 markets in Asia Pacific region participated in the survey. The survey, which was conducted in two phases, covered sectors such as manufacturing, FSI, retail, education and healthcare. The first phase was conducted pre-Covid-19, between December 2019 to January 2020, while the second phase was conducted since Covid-19, that is July 2020.

As per the report, the ‘Culture of Innovation’ refers to an organisation’s ongoing ability to respond quickly to challenges and successfully perform in four dimensions—people, processes, data and technology capabilities. “Indian organisations were compelled to innovate in order to build resilience in the new normal.

However, this development also resulted in innovation becoming easier for organisations in the country,” said Rajiv Sodhi, COO, Microsoft India.

Around 64% of respondents acknowledged that innovation has become easier in the post-COVID-19 world. Prior to the pandemic, only 32.5% of Indian businesses found innovation in their products and services easy. “Moving forward, organisations in India say that they will prioritise increasing customer centricity, while leaders in Asia Pacific plan to focus on investing in technology infrastructure that is robust and allows scalability and flexibility,” added Sodhi.

As per Vasant Rao, MD, India and South Asia, IDC, the future will see organisations increasingly fortify resilience with technology, invest in people’s capabilities and skills, leverage data to increase competitiveness and redesign processes to empower people to continuously drive innovation. “We see amongst leaders a constant appetite for growth and evolution. During Covid-19, 31% of firms in India said they think their business model will lose competitiveness in five years’ time. This desire and urgency for continuous improvement through agility and adaptation to change will determine the success of businesses in this new normal,” he said.