Lessons from Tata's Corporate Innovation Strategy

M anaging innovation in enterprise has always been a complex task, but it’s become even more so as organizations become more globally distributed and new digital technologies proliferate. Some studies of IT companies have used agile approaches in software development and the IT-enabled global innovation ecosystem,1–4 whereas others focus on IT’s effects on innovation.5,6 However, it’s hard to find examples of non-IT firms that have crafted a practical corporate strategy to manage innovations in a variety of contexts globally across industries, and how they have embraced IT to drive innovation. Here, we present Tata Group’s corporate innovation strategy. We analyze how it provides high-level direction and support while allowing significant room for creativity and autonomy to individual companies and business units spread worldwide in multiple industry sectors to devise their competitive or functional innovation strategies. Tata Group, sometimes called the “GE of India,” is one of India’s most prominent business groups; it’s the largest private-sector employer in both India and the UK, and it owns brands such as Jaguar, Land Rover, Taj, Titan, and Tetley. We discuss how Tata Group managed innovation as part of its transformation agenda—which also included initiatives such as the Tata business excellence model (TBEM, derived from the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria developed at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology) and globalization7—to transform itself from a US$5.8 billion Indian firm in 1992 to a $103 billion global corporation in 2014, with more than 65 percent of revenues coming from outside India.