An Open Innovation Infrastructure
A three-sided platform for Tata Consultancy Services
Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, consulting, and business solutions organization that has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses for the past 50 years. TCS believes innovation and collective knowledge can transform the future with greater purpose.
TCS has more than 606,000 employees operating in 46 countries. TCS’s parent is TATA Group which has a legacy of more than 154 years as a philanthropic organization overseeing a wide array of well-known brands and industries around the globe.
For TCS’s project of Organization Models of Innovation, the team was presented with a design problem that required the strategic design of a new infrastructure capability to help leverage and scale innovation across the organization. Unfolding in two
parts, the team was first tasked with scoping, planning, and modeling an open-innovation ecosystem platform to serve as a sensing mechanism to facilitate cross-organizational group thinking, manage discovery documentation, and prioritize latent value opportunities. Secondly, the team was asked to validate and iterate on the model of the platform by proposing use cases that clearly show the value of scaling innovation for TCS and its clients.
As a three-sided platform, the open-innovation infrastructure would sense inputs from internal and external sources. Functionally, it would also incorporate live market awareness, spoke to rigorous governance and ethical oversight, leverage the participation of the organisation’s large and diverse employee body, and better serve TCS’s wide array of clients in need of scaling their own innovation ecosystems.
The New TCS Innovation Engine
The New TCS Innovation Engine
TCS’s Figure 8 Model
The current TCS ‘figure 8’ model for innovation is an iterative process, non-linear between the Agile Execution and Innovation Consulting departments, in close conjunction with the Foresight, Research & Innovation, Subject matter Experts, COIN (Co-Innovation network), and clients.
The core of the project hinges on building a robust innovation portfolio that leverages ecosystem level strategies from Innovation Consulting and rapid, scalable prototypes from Agile Execution.
Current Innovation Model
The figure 8 lies squarely in the core of the innovation web. The core operates within the sphere of internal organization intent determined by the Chief Technological officer, and the sphere of internal capabilities distributed by Human Resources.
The innovation core also considers external intents determined by clients, and co-operates with external capabilities through an informal network of experts. A more specialized group of experts known as COIN (Co-Innovation Network) assists the innovation core closely on many projects.
When needed, the innovation core meets in person with clients, experts, and other TCS departments in physical locations called ‘pace ports’ for facilitation and experimentation workshops. These ports are geo-located in strategic locations to build and maintain client and COIN partnerships.
