Innovation as a Growth Enabler for India

In a world where competitive advantages erode faster than ever, the pursuit of leadership is no longer about scale or dominance but about sustained distinctiveness. At a recent India CEO Forum session in Bangalore, Shishir Joshipura, former MD of Praj Industries, set out a compelling case for treating innovation not as a toolkit but as a cultural anchor. He argued that true growth emerges when organisations stop chasing quarterly wins and instead build systems that outlast individuals. Innovation, in his telling, is the lever that enables businesses not merely to play the game better, but to rewrite the rules altogether.

The Race to Uniqueness

Traditionally, corporate ambition has been framed around becoming ‘number one’ in terms of market share, scale or profitability. Yet history offers countless examples of companies that once led their industries but eventually vanished. Market leadership is inherently fragile. The real race is not to be number one, but to be unique, to create propositions that set an organisation apart in ways that competitors cannot easily replicate. Uniqueness itself is never permanent. A new plant can be replicated in 18 months, export levels matched within a year, and technology copied in far less time. Each advantage carries an expiry date. The challenge for leaders is to continuously recreate distinctiveness, ensuring that their firms are not merely better but different from the rest. This requires a mindset that values originality over imitation and renewal over complacency.

Leadership, Perpetuity and Optionality

Quarterly performance reviews, business plans and strategic cycles dominate the leadership calendar. While such discipline is necessary, it often reduces leadership to the management of short-term outcomes. True leadership, though, is about creating organisations that endure beyond individual tenures. This means designing businesses for perpetuity: institutions that outlast their founders and continue to thrive despite leadership changes. A central part of this responsibility is to build optionality. Organisations must avoid being trapped by a single strategy or market. Instead, leaders should cultivate multiple pathways: across funding streams, technologies, talent pipelines and customer segments. Optionality equips businesses to pivot when conditions change, ensuring they are never wholly dependent on one product, one customer or one model.

Innovation as Culture and Mindset

Many organisations approach innovation as if it were a toolkit: implement a process, adopt a framework, or send employees for a training workshop. Such approaches rarely deliver lasting results. Innovation is not a tool or technique, but a mindset and a culture. When embedded as a core organisational value, innovation shapes budgets, structures and priorities. It dictates how resources are allocated, how R&D is supported and how leadership itself communicates with the wider organisation. Treating innovation as an initiative risks making it episodic; treating it as culture ensures that it becomes systemic. Embedding this mindset requires leadership intent. Leaders cannot simply declare that their organisations are innovative. They must demonstrate it by creating systems, rituals and incentives that reinforce experimentation, customer focus and learning. Only then does innovation become part of the DNA.

Building the Innovation System: Customers, Talent and Crossroads

Sustaining innovation requires attention to three foundational practices that can together transform innovation from a departmental activity into a collective organisational endeavour:

1. Active customer listening: Complaint-management systems and periodic surveys are necessary, but insufficient. True innovation begins with listening beyond complaints— understanding latent pain points and unmet needs. Senior leaders must personally invest time with customers, rather than delegating this task. Innovation flourishes when leaders hear, first-hand, what customers struggle with and aspire to achieve.

2. Pride and ownership: Employees who take pride in their organisation’s capabilities act as brand custodians. Pride fosters confidence, resilience and advocacy, which fuel innovation. Leaders must create environments where employees feel ownership over outcomes, where the first words spoken outside a meeting convey commitment rather than hesitation.

3. Cross-disciplinary collaboration: Breakthrough innovation rarely arises within a single discipline. Today’s vehicles, for instance, are not the exclusive domain of automotive engineers; they require inputs from software, chemistry, electronics and design. Organisations that encourage collaboration across disciplines and siloes create richer possibilities. Innovation happens at crossroads, not in verticals.

Managing Failure, Driving Disruption

Innovation takes multiple forms:

• Incremental innovation, which improves efficiency and productivity.

• Disruptive innovation, which reshapes markets and models.

• Breakthrough innovation, which creates entirely new possibilities.

Incremental improvements are vital and should be the remit of operating managers but leaders must personally champion disruptive and breakthrough innovation. Doing so requires not only vision but also tolerance for risk. A critical determinant of success is how organisations manage failure. Failure must be reframed as learning. Projects that miss deadlines or overshoot budgets must still be mined for insights. Teams must document and share lessons so that knowledge compounds across projects. Stage-gated processes help manage risk and tracking both technology readiness and commercialisation readiness ensures that promising ideas make it to market. Without such systems, even the most brilliant technical solutions risk remaining laboratory curiosities. With them, innovation becomes a managed journey from concept to commercialisation.

Global vs Local: Balancing Innovation

Contexts For MNCs, innovation often encounters structural constraints: global headquarters dictate standards, leaving local teams to execute. Yet innovation must respond to local realities. The principle that works best is: Local as much as necessary, global as much as possible. This ensures that global efficiencies are harnessed, while local adaptations make products and services viable. For instance, solutions that work seamlessly in developed markets may need to be redesigned for Indian conditions. Conversely, innovations tailored for India may find applications in other emerging markets. Sometimes, progress demands bias for action. Leaders may not always secure approvals in advance, but waiting for consensus can mean losing the window of opportunity. In such cases, it is often better to act decisively and later seek forgiveness than to seek permission and risk inertia.

Summing Up…

Innovation is the lever that allows organisations not just to play the game better, but to change the game entirely. For Indian business leaders, the imperative is clear: focus not on being number one, but on being unique. Build organisations that outlast individuals, foster optionality, and embed innovation as a cultural constant. By listening actively to customers, cultivating pride and collaboration and managing failure constructively, organisations can turn innovation into a systemic capability. Balancing global and local imperatives ensures relevance across markets, while a bias for action keeps momentum alive. In an age of volatility, innovation is the one discipline that equips leaders to write the rules rather than play by them.