More Innovations around our needs..Part II

Post noon session opens with KLG systel presenting their intelligent energy consumption management tool connectgaia. Sadly, the presenter wasted much of his valuable time explaining evolution of power and energy. It almost seemed to me like yet another talk leading to the awareness of Global warming. Thankfully we were brought back to the innovation awards, though there was very little time left to showcase their product connectgaia, which is really useful given today’s energy crisis. 

Connectgaia is an end to end solution to track, monitor, analyze and control energy consumptions. To enable this at an industrial plant or a house one needs to buy the connectgaia hardware box which provides intercepting the power flow and sending consumption details to their servers. This can almost instantly be viewed on the web. They provide analytic tools around the data collected to help consumers understand their consumption patterns and intelligently control it from within the web interface. They claim that with their setup it is possible to switch on or switch off a device remotely at any power point connected through the connectgaia box and even schedule them. 

They have had an early adoption by the public sector in India: Railways and Road transport(street lights) deploying the system. IBM, SAP and Zigbee are business partners.

This team too failed to focus around what innovation they bring in business process or business model. I guess their long term vision is definitely game changing. They want to aggressively promote manufacturing and adoption of the hardware boxes by 3rd parties. They as a company want to focus more on the intelligent processing and deriving value out of the data collected. 

It reminded me of what Business Objects tried to do with Insight 08 urging individual contributors to upload their energy consumptions and statisticians across the globe to mine that data to fight global warming & energy crisis. (More here.) Insight website is no longer active post acquisition by SAP and I guess the initiatives weren’t fruitful. It is however interesting to note SAP is their business partner. 

Next in line we have an interesting speaker who opened the talk with “Tyre as a Service“. It was a welcome change given we had heard SaaS, IaaS, PaaS all through. The tone was rightly set to highlight the innovation they did in business process and in business model but for their client. They on their own still operate like a technology services company.

Siddhesh Bhobe of Persistent Systems presented the change they brought in BridgeStone, a global leader in tyre industry. The problem they solved was to get rid of the lethargic and ineffective tyre servicing of trucks. BridgeStone guaranteed their customers to provide this service and used to pair up with service centers to provide the same facility for which they had to pay upfront. Persistent Systems came up with a mobile based solution levaraging RF tracking to completely remodel the way the servicing was done at the service centers. The synchronised tracking and update has also enabled BridgeStone to move to a pay-per-service model.

In a very compact and user friendly application they have enabled viewing and updating history about the tyres – age, miles driven, damages and repair etc. Additionally all tyres are trackable by just walking at a close distance. Apparently in cold weather this improves productivity a lot as the mechanics don’t have to make multiple trips back and forth to measure and note down their findings. Given a extensive history of the tyre is collected this helps BridgeStone in optimizing their internal processes. In all BridgeStone focus has moved from ’selling tyres to servicing tyres’, enabled a direct B2C relation than the earlier B2B.

Though their high involvement into a client’s problem and delivery are exceptional, what was little unexpected was that they did not deliver on a business-value delivery model but rather for the technology development. Again, though this was highly impressive, the innovation was still about enabling innovation for a client than innovating for themselves. At this point it dawns on me that the “Market Facing” in the Innovation Award series is stressed more than I thought. On a personal opinion I think we in India should gradually also focus on innovation at core than enablement (a services model which has always existed).

The jury seemed to quite impressed by the presentation and the Q&A sessions did not have anything much to add.