Executive with a Track Record in Developing Growth Strategies and Solutions: I have devised and implemented winning strategies that have opened up new markets and business opportunities. I have developed strategies that address customer/market needs, secured buy-in from executives/board, motivated the functional organizations to deliver and launched successful products & business models.

 

Family Man: I enjoy spending time with my beautiful wife and two lovely kids. As a family we are a good mix of outdoors and indoors. My son and I are pretty much outdoors and sports oriented while my daughter and my wife like the indoors. This diversity of interests helps us maintain good balance in our lives.

Ideate – Successful Collaborative Innovation @ Wipro

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Recently I met Dinesh Veerula who is a Delivery Manager with Wipro’s BFSI vertical in Hyderabad, India. His expertise is in Financial industry operations outsourcing. The industry he serves is very demanding with strict SLA goals around operations improvement and cost per trade reductions.

To meet these demanding SLA requirements, his team has to continuously innovate and improve data center operations. And he achieves this through a collaborative innovation process that he setup called “Ideate”.

Dinesh has about 150+ people reporting to him in 7 different locations across the world (in India, US, Europe & Singapore). The international locations and the size of his organization make it difficult for him to have a coordinated innovation effort. In this situation many managers resort to top-down innovation (i.e. leaders innovate and everyone else executes).

But Dinesh believed in a method that would motivate his entire staff to contribute innovative ideas. He setup a simple framework, uploaded it to their internal sharepoint site and asked for his entire team to contribute innovative ideas every week. He and other leaders in the team would review those ideas and publish the best ideas every week. Then they would provide the idea contributor the opportunity to lead the development/execution of the idea. This motivated the employees as they perceived this as their chance to be known across the organization as an innovative leader. So they thought of different ideas to improve operations and actively contributed every week.

This resulted in a 200% increase in ideas contributed and about a 5X increase in ideas implemented within one year. These ideas  improved year on year cost savings by 300%, which was very well appreciated by Wipro’s customers.

Not only that, in India where people hop jobs within two years, Dinesh’s team stayed with him for over 3 years on. Morale within the team was high, as all ranks of the team saw this as an opportunity to excel. Even students interns on the team got to contribute and lead ideas, which created further employee retention/attraction benefits for Wipro. Dinesh was awarded the “THE SMART PRACTICE CHAMPION” award, for successfully setting up and leading the “Ideate” process.

Congratulations to Dinesh and his team for making Collaborative Innovation work.