Photo: K Ananth Krishnan, chief technology officer at India’s Tata Consultancy Services, toured the Communitech Hub for the first time on Monday, and discussed the possibility of TCS’s collaborative ecosystem COIN (Co-Innovation Network) at the Hub.
The name Tata Consultancy Services, or TCS, isn’t a familiar one.
But Jaguar, Land Rover, and Tetley are names we’ve seen once or twice, and they all reside under parent company Tata Group, founded in 1868 and based in Mumbai, India.
On Monday, K Ananth Krishnan, chief technology officer at TCS, toured the Communitech Hub for the first time.
He was here as part of the Toronto launch of TCS’ collaborative ecosystem COIN (Co-Innovation Network). COIN is the missing piece between enterprise companies and the startups coming up with the solutions to their problems.
The network has all the relevant representation to foster innovative thinking: startups, academic partners, technology partners, venture capitalists and customers.
After Krishnan’s presentation on COIN, during which he mentioned the possibility of TCS having a presence at the Communitech Hub, we were able to chat with him further on the topic.
Q – What brings you to Waterloo Region?
A – TCS and Waterloo have a fairly long historical connection, and one of the earliest interactions dates back to the 1970s, when H.K. Kesavan, who was a faculty member from [the University of] Waterloo, became a research advisor to TCS.
He really helped set up TCS research in 1981 and that still stays very warm in our hearts that someone from here helped us get started.
Over the 80s there were several technology collaborations with the university. The Watlan (Waterloo Local Area Network Project), one of the first local area networks of that era, was actually commercialized by TCS in India.
Through even the last decade we’ve had some pretty good sponsored research relationships with university.
So it’s not that we are unfamiliar with the quality of work in the ecosystem that exists here; we’re not fully prepared on our side to add value to this ecosystem.
What brings me here is the opportunity to introduce TCS COIN to the community here, to both the University (of Waterloo) and through Communitech to the entrepreneur ecosystem which exists here, and to find ways to add value to both TCS and to the community.
Q – What can entrepreneurs get out of COIN?
A – If I look at it from the outside in, to an entrepreneur COIN is fairly straightforward proposition. An entrepreneur or startup company has an interesting product or an interesting service that they have identified, and with a great deal of capability and a great deal of passion have built that new product or service.
They now would like to address this product or service to the right market and access the market, the global market [of] large corporations, or customers of large corporations and so on.
That is a very difficult proposition for many startups and that’s a role that normally the investors and the startups would perform to the right market, or the personal founders or whoever else would try and do it on their own. COIN is a way by which an entrepreneur can connect to a global innovation ecosystem, which is supported and in many ways operated by TCS. It has other startup companies in the network across the world; it has large corporations who are typically customers of TCS or partners of TCS; other Tata Group companies. Tata Group is large; it’s diversified.
So at a certain level, just access to market is the basic proposition that any entrepreneur can look forward to.
At the next level is the ability to address a bigger canvas, by truly innovating with the ecosystem that COIN provides you. You could combine your product or your service with another startup company from another part of the world, or with something that TCS has constructed, to address a problem landscape they could not or would not be able to tackle on their own. That is the second-level advantage that the startup has – that you can now go after a bigger piece of the pie that you could have done before.
The third piece is to truly have a new business model created around your product. I illustrated that with the example of the startup that they are working on from Denmark, which was in a certain field using satellite imaging for doing mapping for governments, but a totally different application was found in insurance, which was not something that they even thought about when they did their product development. And to them it’s a disruptive, new segment, which has been totally enabled by COIN. Whether it works or not, we will see. But that’s disruption; if it is a straight home run then maybe it’s not that exciting. So you really have to try things out and invest the time, invest the energy, create the solution, go after the right market and the right business model. If it works, great.
Any one of these propositions or solutions would be useful to a startup company: straight access to market is a bare minimum; complex solution creation beyond what you’ve done, that’s the next level; and thirdly, the opportunity to create something disruptive based one or more things coming together.
Q – What does success look like for TCS?
A – Over the last 12 months, a couple of different people from my team have come in here and seen the energy here at Communitech, the startup ecosystem and the university. I had to get a first-hand feel for myself.
I am happy to say that it’s true and not something that someone made up.
What would measure success to me is to make this hub and hubs like this across Canada aware of COIN, and make COIN useful and valuable to the companies and academics in the ecosystem. That’s the first thing.
Unless the partner ecosystem sees value, COIN would not exist. I can dress up and look smart and handsome, but if nobody comes to my party then I have wasted my time, and I have wasted someone else’s.
