Indians are loved world over due to their intellectuality, hardworking nature and their unparalleled ability for Jugaad (an innovative fix or a simple work-around of complex problems). Generally speaking, Indians are doing wonderful job in technology sector and why technology sector alone, it’s across the board now. Many of the world’s largest enterprises have Indians as their CEO’s who are driving high growth for such mammoth organizations e.g. Pepsico, Mastercard, Apple. Mind you, size tends to slow down the growth due to increased complexities.
Global economic expansion and rise of Indians on global map is a boon for India as a whole. It has certainly helped securing unique identity for India on the world map. Despite all this, why Indian Product companies in IT sector are not able to grow to their fullest potential? Why after a certain point these companies call it a quit or struggle to keep up pace of growth? Let’s discuss
I have been associated with Indian IT product companies from the last 8 years at least. The size of these companies has been in the range of 20 Million – 300 Million. With little experience in dealing / working with various product companies following are my general observations (not specific to any company I worked with).
- IP Vs Marketing – IP is heart for any product company but what are the rules of the game? Shall they continue investing heavily into developing / enriching their IP’s all the time? What is more important for them at different point in time of their lifecycle? This is a tricky question and finding a balance between business and IP creation could be a never ending debate and obviously THE most difficult question for these companies to answer themselves.
If you look at the IT products originated from western world and with specific mention to Israel, I have few observations to share:
- They develop the IP considering present and future (Not so Distant hypothetical future).
- Test it, Test it and Test it so that it does not fail (I know few of you must be smiling while reading this J. We all have restarted our computers every time it stopped responding)
- Sell, Sell and Sell as much as they can before finding the right balance between efforts required for IP management and marketing.
On the other side, Indian entrepreneurs (Btw most of them started by technocrats and not by sales gurus – Please note) are so passionate about IP that they tend to postpone the problem of selling the software. IP gives immense pleasure and satisfaction to an extent that all the policies, strategies, growth plans, creative energy, board room discussions and even canteen discussions revolve around IP – This is what killing them softly 🙂
