Dr. Partho Mishra, VP & GM, Service Provider Access Business Unit, Cisco India, discusses how Cisco leverages the benefits of dual-use technologies
B&E: How relevant is reverse innovation for India at large and for Cisco’s R&D operations here in particular?
Dr. Partho Mishra (PM): The potential for engineering and technology in India is immense in the last 10 years, and the analogy I can give is this. In the 1960s, Japanese manufacturers had these el cheapo cars. In the 1970s, they started developing small but best in breed cars. By the end of the 1980s, the Japanese were dominating the US market with models like Lexus and Infiniti. Reverse innovation is a part; there is a huge opportunity for India out there in terms of IT, telecom, computing. If you look at our capabilities, there is capital available to fund the development, and all the information required to develop a product is readily available, as compared to 20 years ago. We should capitalise on all that. At Cisco, reverse innovation is only a part of our agenda, which is to solve problems specific to emerging markets, because we believe that as the GDPs of these countries grow, we will benefit. For instance, look at the Smart Connected Communities idea. If we can build on that, and make people cross a certain threshold, it opens up new possibilities, like being able to provide services on that infrastructure like telemedicine, remote education, et al. If you can replace poor physical infrastructure with great virtual infrastructure on top of that, you can enable things.
B&E: How do you qualify a reverse innovation opportunity?
PM: Even if there is no opex/funding constraint, the reality of the situation is that we have more work to be done than there are people. When we have situations where we are able to have du-al-use technologies (which we are designing for emerging markets, but can sell to other markets), we can kill two birds with one stone. There lies the engineering challenge – how can you design a product that can scale up and down? It’s something like what car manufacturers have started doing in the last 10 years. They build a common chassis and skins change. We approach it in a very similar way. Like for the ASR 901, we have different SKUs, but we took the various scale, features and power consumption requirements into account when we were developing this product.
B&E: You are optimistic on India’s R&D potential. Are there critical need gaps that need to be filled?
PM: Intellectual capital and seed capital is available, and so are global commercialisation opportunities. But we need technology leaders who will say, “Five years down the road,that’s what’s coming, and that’s what we should be building.” In India, we still have a services mentality. Let me go and develop x software and y hardware. It is so incremental and risk averse. If I were to dedicate 500 engineers to doing this, I am going to get a very predictable ROI. The other thing is that if you go to the core of any start up in Silicon Valley, you may have 100-200 engineers. In addition, they also have 3-4 system architects. They are the brains, who know everything about how everything works together there. There are too many of them at Silicon Valley. In fact, if you walk into a Star-bucks, you’ll find such people there. That’s a critical piece missing in India, but it is fast coming up.
B&E: How relevant is reverse innovation for India at large and for Cisco’s R&D operations here in particular?
Dr. Partho Mishra (PM): The potential for engineering and technology in India is immense in the last 10 years, and the analogy I can give is this. In the 1960s, Japanese manufacturers had these el cheapo cars. In the 1970s, they started developing small but best in breed cars. By the end of the 1980s, the Japanese were dominating the US market with models like Lexus and Infiniti. Reverse innovation is a part; there is a huge opportunity for India out there in terms of IT, telecom, computing. If you look at our capabilities, there is capital available to fund the development, and all the information required to develop a product is readily available, as compared to 20 years ago. We should capitalise on all that. At Cisco, reverse innovation is only a part of our agenda, which is to solve problems specific to emerging markets, because we believe that as the GDPs of these countries grow, we will benefit. For instance, look at the Smart Connected Communities idea. If we can build on that, and make people cross a certain threshold, it opens up new possibilities, like being able to provide services on that infrastructure like telemedicine, remote education, et al. If you can replace poor physical infrastructure with great virtual infrastructure on top of that, you can enable things.
B&E: How do you qualify a reverse innovation opportunity?
PM: Even if there is no opex/funding constraint, the reality of the situation is that we have more work to be done than there are people. When we have situations where we are able to have du-al-use technologies (which we are designing for emerging markets, but can sell to other markets), we can kill two birds with one stone. There lies the engineering challenge – how can you design a product that can scale up and down? It’s something like what car manufacturers have started doing in the last 10 years. They build a common chassis and skins change. We approach it in a very similar way. Like for the ASR 901, we have different SKUs, but we took the various scale, features and power consumption requirements into account when we were developing this product.
B&E: You are optimistic on India’s R&D potential. Are there critical need gaps that need to be filled?
PM: Intellectual capital and seed capital is available, and so are global commercialisation opportunities. But we need technology leaders who will say, “Five years down the road,that’s what’s coming, and that’s what we should be building.” In India, we still have a services mentality. Let me go and develop x software and y hardware. It is so incremental and risk averse. If I were to dedicate 500 engineers to doing this, I am going to get a very predictable ROI. The other thing is that if you go to the core of any start up in Silicon Valley, you may have 100-200 engineers. In addition, they also have 3-4 system architects. They are the brains, who know everything about how everything works together there. There are too many of them at Silicon Valley. In fact, if you walk into a Star-bucks, you’ll find such people there. That’s a critical piece missing in India, but it is fast coming up.
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