Mylab Discovery Solutions is a biotechnology firm based in Pune, Maharashtra, a state in the western part of India. The company is focused on developing and commercializing diagnostic solutions and automation in molecular, serology, and immunology areas. Its applications are in clinical diagnostics, drug discovery, biomedical research, agri genomics, and animal and food safety. Till early 2020, like any other young venture in a nascent market, Mylab was struggling to raise funds and spread awareness of high-priced but more accurate "molecular diagnostics" in a price-sensitive market. Its fortunes changed in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. The firm was dubbed the "poster child of the COVID-19 pandemic" after it rose to the limelight for developing COVID-19 RTPCR and rapid antigen test kits. The next two years saw it raising funds, automating and scaling production, doubling down on research and development, launching multiple new products, and pursuing inorganic growth through acquisitions and alliances. However, by January 2022, the pandemic seemed to have run its course. The founders, Hasmukh Rawal and Shailendra Kawade, were considering strategies to maintain Mylab's growth momentum. Through a series of interviews with key players at Mylab, we have developed a case study to delve into how a startup in the nascent biotechnology industry in India succeeded in turning out innovation after innovation and scaling up production of test kits from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands in the span of a few months. The learning objectives of this case are to understand the unique challenges faced by ventures in nascent markets, compare the ecosystem of ventures in nascent industries with those in mature industries, and discuss how stakeholder relationships evolve as a venture advances in its journey.
Case A describes the challenges a multinational corporation, Cisco Systems Inc., faces in an emerging market in developing new products specific to local needs. Dr Ishwardutt Parulkar and his team at Cisco's Indian subsidiary in Bangalore had identified a promising concept that could potentially become the company's first product developed end-to-end at the India site. They had to address three critical issues: How to define the right product to address the specific needs of telecom network customers in the emerging market? How to build the business case for approval from the headquarters in the US? How to compensate for the significant gaps in the Indian ecosystem that was not fully mature in terms of partners and skills required to develop such a product? Case B presents how the Cisco team resolved the new product development challenges. The success of the new Advanced Services Router (ASR) 901 would mark a milestone in Cisco's journey of evolution of engineering capability in emerging countries into the next phase of innovation and thought leadership. Learning objectives: 1) Identify key challenges in developing a mainstream product from concept to completion in an emerging market. 2) Understand essential factors for building subsidiary R&D capabilities for mainstream product development. 3) Introduce the Technology Champion framework, which serves to bring out innovation aspirations in a subsidiary R&D team.
Case A describes the challenges a multinational corporation, Cisco Systems Inc., faces in an emerging market in developing new products specific to local needs. Case B describes the journey undertaken by Dr Ishwardutt Parulkar and his team in developing the Advanced Services Router (ASR) 901 - from idea to launch in 2011. The case helps to identify key success factors for new product development through a decentralized R&D model in emerging markets and to recognize the importance of the ecosystem for successful innovation. Learning objectives: 1) Identify key challenges in developing a mainstream product from concept to completion in an emerging market. 2) Understand essential factors for building subsidiary R&D capabilities for mainstream product development. 3) Introduce the Technology Champion framework, which serves to bring out innovation aspirations in a subsidiary R&D team.
State Bank of India is India's oldest and largest bank with the government of India as its majority shareholder. Arundhati Bhattacharya, a 35-year old veteran of the bank, is appointed as its chairman in October 2013. Her appointment coincides with Moody's downgrading the bank's debt due to rising non-performing assets. She embarks on a mission to improve the bank's risk taking and management abilities, ensure uniform customer experience, and encourage greater collaboration among various verticals. Her efforts help the bank reduce it non-performing assets and improve its profitability. However, Bhattacharya knows that these gains will be fleeting without the development of a trained workforce who can address 21st century industry problems with speed and creativity. This requires transforming SBI into a performance-oriented bank supported by a new career development and remuneration system. Bhattacharya wonders if attempting to change the culture of a 206-year old mammoth organization is feasible or a mere pipe dream.
This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. For more than a decade, multinational enterprises from developed countries have moved a substantial part of their R&D activity to emerging markets such as India and China. The location of R&D in developing countries was initially driven largely by the availability of skilled personnel at low cost. At first, these R&D centers in emerging markets operated primarily as extended arms of R&D in the home country, executing well-defined projects under close supervision from headquarters. However, the dynamics of multinationals'R&D centers are rapidly changing. Emerging markets are new growth drivers of the global economy, and their unique bundle of opportunities and challenges can be a wellspring of innovation for a multinational company. Simultaneously, many R&D centers in emerging markets have evolved to accumulate advanced technical capabilities, leading their employees to clamor for higher-value-added work and to seek responsibility for a complete product or technology. Given these trends, R&D subsidiaries in emerging markets are uniquely positioned to play an important role in multinational companies'innovation strategy. However, this thinking is often at odds with the dominant innovation mindset, structures, and processes within multinational companies based in developed countries. This article advances a framework that can be used by managers in multinational companies to support the key decisions on innovating for emerging markets. The framework is based on learnings gleaned from the successful development of the ASR 901 aggregation services routers, a product family that was conceptualized and developed by Cisco's India R&D center for emerging-market customers but was also adopted by global customers.
In the early years of the new millennium, citizens of the growing industrial and commercial city of Pune, India, often faced power cuts as the state-run electricity utility struggled to meet growing demand. Government projections suggested that this situation would continue for several years. Rather than take this situation for granted, a group of concerned industrialists met under the umbrella of the Confederation of Indian Industry and the leadership of Pradeep Bhargava to find solutions to this problem. They soon realized that each of the large companies resident in the city had huge back-up diesel generation sets that were often idle since the power supplied from the grid was cheaper, even after they paid a commitment charge to the utility for ensuring continuous power supply. Could this back-up resource be used to meet the shortfall of power faced by the city? A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation revealed that the city's shortfall and the captive generating capacity of the largest companies matched each other. Feeding this power into the grid was complex technically as well as from a regulatory perspective. Instead, the group realized, why not persuade the companies to use their diesel gensets for their own consumption during peak periods, thus freeing up grid power for use by the citizens and other businesses of the city? This proposal came to be known as the Pune Power Model. Different stakeholders such as the industry regulator, citizen groups, the government, political parties and the industry had different views on the feasibility as well as the desirability of pursuing this model. This case describes the challenges faced, and the change strategies used, by the proponents of the Pune Power Model in getting the model accepted and implemented. It raises questions regarding the appropriateness of such a model as well as the role of industry in solving social problems.
In India, air travel in the early twentieth century is mostly between major cities and has historically been driven by businesses. However, a set of relatively unused airfields exist in or near smaller cities, presenting a potential opportunity for generating air travel demand in these locations. This would require a thorough understanding of existing travel options and the design of an air travel offering that can successfully compete with these options. The three-part case describes a methodology to arrive at the appropriate new air travel offering and an assessment of the extent of potential demand in this context. In the first part (A), competing travel modes are examined and the attributes that are relevant to the design of a new air travel offering are identified. A choice-based conjoint experiment is designed and pilot data is obtained and analyzed.
In India, air travel in the early twentieth century is mostly between major cities and has historically been driven by businesses. However, a set of relatively unused airfields exist in or near smaller cities, presenting a potential opportunity for generating air travel demand in these locations. This would require a thorough understanding of existing travel options and the design of an air travel offering that can successfully compete with these options. The three-part case describes a methodology to arrive at the appropriate new air travel offering and an assessment of the extent of potential demand in this context. Inputs from part (A), which detail a pilot conjoint study, are used to refine the design and data is collected from a large sample for one origin-destination pair and presented in the second part (B).
In India, air travel in the early twentieth century is mostly between major cities and has historically been driven by businesses. However, a set of relatively unused airfields exist in or near smaller cities, presenting a potential opportunity for generating air travel demand in these locations. This would require a thorough understanding of existing travel options and the design of an air travel offering that can successfully compete with these options. The three-part case describes a methodology to arrive at the appropriate new air travel offering and an assessment of the extent of potential demand in this context. In the first part (A), competing travel modes are examined and the attributes that are relevant to the design of a new air travel offering are identified. A choice-based conjoint experiment is designed and pilot data is obtained and analyzed.