c




     
 
 

 
 

The term Innovation is a broad one, as it can be implied to any field of any respect, yet it is very
simplistic in nature. It is something everyone must do in order to either get an edge over their
competitors or just make something look, feel or be perceived better. Innovation, in scholarly
terms, would be the process of finding new ways of doing something, already existing, in a better
way or even giving birth to a new concept all together; all this in order to achieve strategic
advantage over the competitive market and thereby retaining that advantage by continual
dynamism.

There isn¶t a vast dissimilarity between Innovation and Creativity, that being, the former is just a
concept which involves thinking of new ideas and methods but Innovation is rather a process that
takes Creativity a step further by involving those ideas into machinery that will materialize them,
giving them a tangible form or value.
Innovation has various types,
1.? ½adical: This variant of innovation that causes a drastic change to the existing processes
and products that it transforms existing markets and also creates new ones.
2.? Incremental: The existing products are improved to facilitate optimum benefit from
resources.
3.? Architectural: This changes the whole system of how things work. Example, The advent of
handheld mobile communication changed the demand for fixed telecommunication
systems.
4.? Disruptive: This is when an innovative trend offers a product that has significant demand
and is more cost effective as compared to its more superior feature-rich counterpart in the
market, thus causing a downfall for the superior product meant only for the elite or
advance users. Example, Mainframe systems were very complicated to operate and were
very expensive but their market was diminished when Personal Computing devices suiting
the requirements of general public was launched.
5.? Discontinuous: ½adical Innovation goes hand in hand with this, though here, the product
created is completely new even in terms of usage, and thus, a completely new revolution
is given advent to.

Success on innovation depends mainly on two things: ½esources and the capacity of the firm to
put them into effect1. There are three core process of conceptualising an idea, first; generating
ideas, Selecting and evaluating them, and lastly Aligning resources together to implement them1.
Innovation can also be looked at from the angles of Product, Process, Paradigm (When there is an
internal or external shift in thinking or perception by people) and Positioning.




I have selected the case study of Aravind Eye Clinics to be the basis of my assignment. It is a
³franchisee´ Hospital chain offering Eye care to the masses. It was started in 1976 with only 11
beds for in-patient care and presently has treated over 2.4 million people annually according to the
statistics of the year 2009 and has over 4000 beds at 5 Hospitals. This staggering growth was
achieved only by means of an innovative initiative by the founder, Dr. Venkataswami, to vitalise
the generalist method of running a hospital.

The Toyota Production System, which involved rechristening of a series of processes and aligning
them all together so as to have optimal resource utilization and also achieve remarkable quality in
the shortest of time periods, has started a chain reaction waking up many production enterprises
to realise the fact that attention to minor details can be immensely fruitful, this closely relates to
how Aravind¶s processes function.

McDonalds has managed to strategize itself in a way that every franchisee would serve burgers of
the same quality and taste. This was the main inspiration for Dr. Venkataswami, and seeing the
tremendous potential it had to deliver to a large sector without compromising on the aspect of
quality, it was a challenge to have its application in the health care industry, an idea that not many
would have thought possible.

The main reasons for the success of this venture was the fact that emphasis was laid on aspects
which were mostly overlooked by most Hospitals, which again was the basis for them selecting
various ideas to implement, which are:
1.? Bureaucratic and overly process oriented operations which hampered productivity.
2.? Increasing doctor and nurse efficiency by charting proper allocation of job responsibilities.
3.? Synchronizing all resource and information with surgeons, doctors etc.
4.? Too much paper work involved in operations.
5.? Scarcity in well trained ophthalmic surgeons and nurses.
6.? Low affordability of people.
7.? Poor logistics.
8.? Expensive essential technical equipment imports.

Now, whenever we think of catering to a mass, there is always a question of quality. What is good
innovation if it doesn¶t offer a qualitative product? And seeing as Aravind Eye Clinics are offering
eye care to almost half a million people yearly there has to be a system governing quality, and
that benchmark can also be achieved not by a regulating authority but by aligning the whole
functioning of the Clinic into one single process. Therefore, it may seem audacious when a firm
claims to have been doing 1000 surgeries on a daily basis. The most important innovation that
helped achieve this is that Aravind followed a parallel system of surgeries, i.e. there would be
multiple operation beds in a large hall and 1 surgeon would be allocated 2 patients to be operated
on consecutively, also, 2 helping nurses and 2 running nurses were appointed for both the
patients. This system, I feel, is quite similar to the Batch Processing used in many manufacturing
concerns. Thus, cutting down intermittent time and arrangement of inventory and also
overcoming the shortage of trained ophthalmic surgeons. This innovation was selected solely for
the purpose of attending more patients, but also benefitted by means of saving time, manpower
and resources. This strategy helped in the sustenance of the organisation by reducing the average
cost per surgery to $25 as compared to the market price of $300 in India and approx. $3000 in
America also taking into consideration that only 40% of patients paid for their surgery and
treatment for the rest was free.

In order to select a particular idea for implementation there has to be sufficient market research,
So Aravind¶s way of overcoming this was that they recruited retired ophthalmic surgeons from
different hospitals and combined their experience and knowledge to form a potential strategy of
overcoming obstacles.

Seeing as India had 200 million cases of needless blindness and were impacting merely 7 % of
them, Aravind had to reach out to as many as possible, so they followed the approach of setting
up satellite Eye care clinics and ½ural Eye Health camps, and doing this would mean further
complicating the system. Therefore, this was seen as an opportunity and a new system was
implemented which no other Hospital in India had used. They brought technology and manpower
together to establish a satellite communication system which would allow the reports of certain
patients be send for immediate consultation to the Doctors, at the Base Hospital in the city far
away, for treatment prescription. Processes were made highly streamlined so that a patient who
required a pair of spectacles would be handed a prescribed pair within 20 minutes in accordance to
the frame selected by the patient with respect to the growing popularity in fashion. Delays cannot
be made on field visits as this would mean additional transportation cost. They have also used
basic home electronics and tweaked them into devices of technical usage, Example, A normal
digital camera has been modified into a ½etinal imaging device.

There were challenges regarding technical equipment as well, most of which was imported from
developed nations wherein health care is marginally high priced. So, in order to overcome this, a
new division to Aravind was initiated, Aurolab, which would manufacture Intra-ocular lenses at a
much cheaper price. An imported lens of the same quality costs $150 where as the domestic
production cost was merely $2. Thus a new business opportunity was ventured into which allowed
the export of goods manufactured. This helped them capture 10% of the Global market for
technical ocular products.




The main ideology behind their widespread operations was to grow the market so that more and
more people would be aware of its activities and this would be achieved only by means of giving
quality service.

Innovation is synonymous with risk taking and firms that develop revolutionary products take on
the greatest risks as they have to create completely new markets, but in this case the method was
rather an incremental systemic innovation method. This has indeed, influenced many companies to
revamp their strategies. The challenge of innovation in today¶s fast paced world is by continuously
trying new things. Smart managers realise that this challenge is not a simplistic process involving
a few sessions of brainstorming but a continuous, complex and a dynamic one1.

Companies that are open to the idea of change remain, and those that don¶t, disappear.



  
1
Tidd, J., and Bessant, J. (2008). Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Chapter 1:Innovation Imperative, Wiley.

Tidd, J., and Bessant, J. (2008). Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Chapter 2:Organising Innovation and
Enterpreneurship, Wiley.

Stamm, B.V.(2008) Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity, John Wiley and sons ltd,2 nd edition.

Tidd, J., and Bessant, J. (2009). Managing innovation: integrating technological, market and organizational
change, 4th edition, Wiley.

Christensen, C. (1997). Innovator¶s Dilemma, Harvard Business School Press.

@@@

 

 




 @@@

  

?