Research & Development and
Innovation Policy
CMC Limited is committed to research and development and will strive to develop sustainable business advantage in competitive markets across products, solution and service lines.
CMC will commit an annual budget for research and development that is guided by the following business strategy:
- Active and focused management of current product lines to undertake functional, technical and service delivery features to increase competitive gap, explore newer markets and create compelling market relevance by solving customer needs.
- Investment in selected new service and product lines after deployment of idea and innovation management to create new revenue lines and advancement of communities that we serve.
- Developing a culture of innovation that is pervasive including tools and technology required for such collaboration and knowledge sharing across the organization.
- Establishing relations with academia and partner labs to engage in research which will yield competitive products/service lines in future.
RESEARCH:
CMC will collaborate with academia and research labs for university led research in emerging technology areas.
CMC will setup R&D labs towards applied research and advance development (frameworks for use in products and solutions) and to take research to the field.
CMC will identify emerging technology areas and develop proof of concept for the same.
CMC Research will be driven by business domain and emerging technology scan which has relevance to its product and service portfolio to create next generation capabilities.
Enable supporting HR policies that allow employees to take sabbaticals to gain doctoral and post-graduate know-how in domains which match CMC research agenda.
DEVELOPMENT:
CMC will operationalize a Product Management Office for product lifecycle management.
The salient points related to Product Management lifecycle include:
- Development and management of roadmap of changes, upgrades and features which will be assembled based on market analysis, customer feedback, internal product and architecture revaluation and technology scan for emerging changes in architecture/business service delivery and competitive pressures.
- Management of commercials of product lifecycle to decide profitability, brand awareness increase, overall contribution of asset leverage in sales to be made part and parcel of lifecycle management.
- Ranking, sorting and ordering selection of features for implementation through risk, resource and reward analysis.
- CMC will undertake product benchmarking for features and technology and establish product roadmaps based on benchmarking results from independent third party sources.
CMC will collaborate with technology partners to ensure effective transfer of knowledge and know-how; and the subsequent absorption, adaptation and upgradation of acquired knowledge; and to jointly go-to-market with these technologies by architecting solutions for prospective customers on these technologies.
CMC will integrate resources from Architecture and Technology Consulting Group and relevant SBUs and IPs to facilitate product development teams in undertaking roadmap development and product evaluations at regular interval. This will also be used by relevant IPs and SBUs to establish solution portfolio for their identified industry verticals.
INNOVATION:
CMC will promote a culture of innovation by creating an environment that promotes and recognizes innovative ideas across products, solutions, services and processes, along with mechanisms to take these forward as new-product and service ideas to launch and diffusion.
CMC will operationalize Idea management framework including sourcing of ideas from market/within CMC/Industry leaders, idea assessment and ideation, prototyping and development and diffusion of new products/services. This will be faciliated using an Incubation cell for taking new product ideas to market quickly based on methods such as rapid application delivery platforms sourced internally or externally after establishing the business canvas has been drawn up covering customer segmentation, value proposition, channels, cost structures, revenue model, key activities, resources and partnerships.
All new product and service development / enhancement along with the implementation of chosen innovative ideas will follow a stage-gate process for technical and business risk assessment towards ROI fulfilment and ability to fast fail in case targets are not met.
Implementation of process and technology improvements within Projects and delivery centers will happen under the CMMi and TBEM excellence model in force currently.
TOOLING
R&D Cell will work with CIO Team and other corporate team to enhance, co-develop and deploy corporate wide tools for management of product lines, innovation, research and knowledge management activities.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY MANAGEMENT
R&D cell will work with Corporate legal teams to ensure sufficient intellectual property protection is made for all products, trademarks and patents generated by all the above activities.
COMMUNICATION
CMC R&D activities covering all the above areas will be published in a Quaterly newsletter aimed at CMC employees and CMC Board.
The Head, R&D and Innovation will be responsible for directing research activities and ensuring an adequate implementation of this policy.
R Ramanan
MD&CEO
July 1, 2011
