Digital First is Driving Innovation Opportunities with India
ATOMIC SKY LEADERSHIP BREAKFAST SERIES
This month’s Atomic Sky Leadership Breakfast Series panel focused on Innovation, India and Australia. That’s a broad topic but some very strong themes came through from all speakers.
Atomic Sky India Leadership Panel. Tom Calder, Ashley Brown, Amit Kumar Mishra, Graeme Stanway
Like most governments, India has been investing heavily to lead its transformation to a digital-first nation. Amit Kumar Mishra, Consule General of India to Perth highlighted that providing greater transparency through e-governance technology, open access and nation-wide involvement are central themes to this transformation. Digital infrastructure projects, on-demand government services, mobile device adoption and cloud computing are extending services to citizens whilst providing them more direct involvement.
The vision areas of the Digital India initiative has 3 key vision areas:
- Digital Infrastructure as a Core Utility to Every Citizen
- Governance and Services on Demand
- Digital Empowerment of Citizens
As a domestic market the nation is also continuing to evolve as a strong massive incubation ground for global technology platforms.
“India is on the move adopting and embedding innovation – from governments’ wanting to using Big Data to change inefficient processes and make better decisions, corporates co-developing and embedding world-leading ideas into their global offerings and young Indians building startups and entrepreneurial careers. Australian know-how is well placed to complement India’s needs, and can work collaboratively to the benefit of both nations building solutions in one of the world’s fastest growing economies.” (Tom Calder, former Trade Commission to Mumbai and current Austrade WA State Manager).
Dnyanesh Kelkar of Tech Mahindra similarly stated that Australia was for Indian companies both an important market and a potential source of innovative growth partners in many sectors.
The report also found that technology and social capability will underpin international expansion from the nation. KPMG‘s Ashley Brown expanded on this from his own experience helping larger organisations with their innovation strategies and in adapting to work with high growth SMEs. Ash concurred that socially responsible companies will outperform those who wait for government to frame social impact requirements.
Graeme Stanway of VCI spoke at the event on the findings of their recently
launched State of Innovation Report. One of the findings from his interviews of C-level Executives across India was that the degree of independence of the India-China axis from the West. Reiterating that Australian companies should look to partner in these large Asian markets and grow globally from that base.
Australia is amongst the leaders in global education and high quality public research which plays a central part of strategic positioning and knowledge-centric competitive
advantage. “While there’s great emphasis in Australia on growing international education exports to India there are also opportunities in many other sectors – particularly those that build on our leading resources, energy and agriculture sectors. Industry-engaged universities can play key roles in building on these emerging linkages with India and the important Indo-Pacific region ” (Mark Stickells, The University of Western Australia).
The Atomic Sky Leadership Series pulls together diverse audiences from corporate executives, government, Universities and entrepreneurs. In addition to cross-sector networking, they are introduced to innovation learnings from other geographies or companies that are leading transformational change.
All events are moderated by Peter Rossdeutscher, Chairman of CSA Global. So far this year we have focused on insights on pathways and learnings from technology transformation in China, Hong Kong as an incubator nation, Innovation Cluster successes of the Nordic region and how large organisations are leveraging crowd thinking.