Rishikesha T. Krishnan

Software Product Development in India: Lessons from Six Cases

While the software industry is considered a highly successful economic growth engine in India (NASSCOM, 2002a), its rapid growth in recent years has been achieved by firms primarily providing manpower-intensive customized software development and maintenance services to foreign clients (Arora et al., 2001). While this business model has enabled Indian software companies to transit smoothly from software ‘body-shopping’ services to offshore software development in India, it has also made them vulnerable to the business cycles in client countries. The software services model is manpower intensive, and growth is achieved only by a proportionate increase in the number of software engineers employed. This results in large organizations that become increasingly difficult to coordinate and control. The competitive advantages of this business model are narrow (Arora, Gambardella and Torrisi, 2001) and may over time be eroded by lower cost countries like China.

Innovation in the Indian Information Technology Industry: A Study of the Software Product Development Process

We examine the Indian context for software product development and build on the general literature on product development to develop an understanding of the software product development process in India. We do the latter by drawing from a detailed study of six specific software product development projects ofsix different Indian firms. The products were chosen to provide a variety of industrial contexts, types of firms, types of markets and levels of customisation. Based on a cross-product analysis on parameters such as product definition and positioning, choice of product, technology, product architecture and customisation, version management, marketing and product launch, reward and incentive systems, and quality systems, we draw implications for software product development by companies and for policy makers in the Indian context.

Leadership Development in Organizations in India: The Why and How of It (Part II)

Aarti Shyamsunder, Anand S*, Ankush Punj*, Arvind Shatdal*, B M Vyas, Balaji Kumar, Binu Philip, C Manohar Reddy*, Chitra Sarmma, Gopal Mahapatra, Govind Srikhande, Kartikeyan V, Manoj Jaiswal*, Nandini Chawla*, Prabhat Rao, Prakash K Nair, Prasad Kaipa, Rajshekhar Krishnan, Rishikesha T Krishnan*, Rituraj Sar*, S K Vasant, S Ramesh Shankar*, Santrupt Misra*, Shabari Madappa, Sudhakar B*, Swasthika Ramamurthy, Twisha Anand, Vasanthi Srinivasan*, Vikas Rai Bhatnagar*, Vishwanath P, Vivek Subramanian and Neharika Vohra and Deepti Bhatnagar (Coordinators)

Factors Influencing Choice of Business Strategies by Government Research Laboratories under Pressure to Increase External Earnings: An Exploratory Study

Concerned by the seeming lack of accountability of government research laboratories, governments the world over have adopted fiscal control measures to make them more business-like and responsive to user needs. These have typically consisted of expecting them to generate a portion of their revenues from actual users of their services. In this study we examined the strategies adopted by five government research laboratories in India in response to a policy directive that they should generate at least one third of their budget from external sources, particularly industry. The performance of these laboratories, functioning under the aegis of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research, was studied over an eight-year period after the policy was proposed. All the laboratories studied worked in areas where they could develop product or process technologies for use by industry.The major finding of this study was that the strategies adopted by the laboratories were influenced substantially by the founding conditions, early leadership and the resultant organizational culture of the laboratory and these appeared to play a bigger role than the structure of the industry served by the laboratory or the nature of the technology involved. The main implication of this is that control measures like external earnings targets are unlikely to achieve policy objectives if they are applied across-the-board without attention to the history, culture and competencies of individual laboratories.