Continuous innovation key to long-term sustainable growth – Frost & Sullivan

GIL 2012 summit discusses convergence-based growth opportunities and the new mega trends.

The 2012 Indian edition of Frost & Sullivan’s global flagship event, the Global Community of Growth, Innovation and Leadership (GIL), which is conducted across 14 countries, was held in Mumbai on October 10.

The event titled ‘Journey to Visionary Innovation’ saw participation from more than 150 delegates across industries and recognised innovators and leaders across trade and commerce including those from the transportation and logistics segment for 2012 and awarded them with the 2012 Growth Excellence Awards. The awards were based on the best practices research conducted by consulting firm Frost & Sullivan during the year. The event also saw the launch of ‘New Mega Trends, written by Sarwant Singh, partner, Frost & Sullivan. The book identifies the 10 most important global mega trends — global, sustained and macroeconomic forces of development impacting the world.

The event opened with Aroop Zutshi, global president and managing partner, Frost & Sullivan, addressing the relevance of innovation for the survival of business houses across industries. He explained the importance of innovation to not only survive but also thrive in the future business environment and urged the attendees to measure the current state of their businesses to understand where they are positioned today in terms of growth and future growth potential.

The sessions underlined the significance of benchmarking the current position, exploring the white spaces beyond the industry and regular state of operations (similar to the globally known Blue Ocean Strategy of not competing neck-to-neck with the other known competitors, for the known customers and rather generate high growth by creating new demand in an unexplored space), and studying and understanding the best practices implemented by the leaders across segments.

Singh’s session based on convergence and mega trends identified the emerging opportunities and new business areas. For example, the convergence of energy and automobiles are giving way to new space of electric vehicles and hybrids. Terming ‘e-mobility’ as one of the mega trends, Singh explained that the mass urbanisation and new cities are generating the need of smart cars which would be driven by alternate sources of energy such as the hybrid systems and electric vehicles. According to Singh, e-mobility will gain prominence by 2018 onwards globally. In the Indian context, he mentioned that electric two-wheelers will gain centrestage in the coming 3-4 years as the prices of the lithium ion batteries will come down, thanks to the expected need-based economies of large scale production. “Chennai is going to be the next Detriot,” said Singh as he added that he anticipates India becoming a manufacturing hub for the global automotive industry.

While launching the book, ‘New Mega Trends’ and its relevance for India, Singh said “this book highlights those trends that provide a plethora of innovative growth opportunities across the ecosystem. All these global trends are applicable to India, and understanding them and their underlying forces will help one identify as well as drive new business and career opportunities.” “In a nutshell, GIL 2012 imparted the three takeaways to the corporates across the industries – explore the white spaces and seize the convergence and new mega trends-based growth opportunities, understand the best practices and implement the same structuring the operations and processes,” said V G Ramakrishnan, managing director, South Asia, Frost & Sullivan.

While DHL Express was awarded with the logistics service provider brand of the year honour, SafeExpress bagged the award for being the best logistics service provider transporting automotive components.

AMIT PANDAY