GOPICHAND KATRAGADDA

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The Group CTO of India’s largest conglomerate Tata Group has set out to achieve the ambitious task of driving technology and innovation across 120 companies across the Tata Group.

We don’t want to depend only on partners. My role is to make sure we generate sufficient intellectual property, says Gopichand Katragadda.

At the group level what we are doing is, we are working with innovation in three large buckets. One is to ensure that we are participating along with the group companies and helping them be more innovative.

The Tata group appears to be one of the conglomerates putting design into practice; The safety wearable is the first successful project ready for the market.

The group has set aside $25 million over a five-year period to fund the research and will even send the group's employees to the universities to work on the research.

The group held its first CIO forum in March with about 30 CEOs, 50 CIOs and CTOs and digital evangelists from different group companies.

The strategy is to ensure that companies are prepared to innovate and that the process goes beyond just having the initial ideas.

What it is looking for are solutions for some of the toughest problems faced by Tata companies across products, business models and internal processes.

The Cyrus Mistry-led group is pushing for innovation across 120 companies to help marry technology, digital and innovation under one man.

In 2013-14, the Tata group spent Rs 2.5 per cent of its revenue or Rs 16,000 crore on R&D which rose 20 basis points to Rs 17,896 crore in 2014-15.

Tata Sons is handing over the reins of its almost decade-old Innovation Group to its technology head Gopichand Katragadda.

“The move will create point people for becoming more effective in deploying customer-centric ideas,” one of them told ET.

In their in-house magazine, ’Tata Review’, Gopichand Katragadda , group chief technology officer of Tata Sons said ‘one of the approaches to track trends in science and materials is through university collaborations’.

Tata Group plans to double its patent base to 4,000 in three years through innovation in the century old conglomerate.

The group saw innovation by its companies jumping by a whopping 15-fold over the past decade, with 1,580 project entries under promising innovations.

Conglomerates have companies that work in different industry segments, where technology needs are vastly different and so much of the buying was decentralised.

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