Mr G Sunderraman, Executive Vice President, Godrej & Boyce,
Mr G Sunderraman
Godrej's chotuKool is a cooling solution especially designed for rural households in India. Co-designed by villagers, chotuKool turned out to be a just right product, as it comes with just right features including: energy efficiency. chotuKool consumes just 55w power and can work on inverter or battery, keeps foods and vegetables at 20 degree Celsius below the ambient temperature (thanks to its high-end insulation, it can maintain this temperature for 2-3 hours even when there is no power supply).
The product has recently won The Edison Awards 2012(gold winner in the category of Social Impact) for Godrej for its innovation and excellence in the development of new products and services.
In an interview to India CoCreates Mr G Sunderraman, Executive Vice President (Corporate Development), Godrej & Boyce, the man behind the chotuKool idea, tells why chotuKool is a classic case of “co-creation”, and how Godrej's team worked closely with potential consumers to get insights on their needs, desired solutions and barriers to consumption. Excerpts:
Just Right Cooling System, Co-created with Rural India Younomy: How Godrej as a company is adopting the concepts of open innovation and co-creation?
Sunderraman: I think there is a lot of sensationalising around social media and co-creation. Look at the market capitalization of social media companies like Facebook, for instance. We should understand that social networking and co-creation are there deep inside every form of collaboration within and outside a company.
Godrej is a 115-year old organization. We started with making locks before moving into cupboards, refrigerators, and office equipments. Throughout this diversified growth path, we had used many co-creation practices to produce cross-fertilization of ideas for development of new products. Of course, we are using IT and web tools today to enhance open innovation and collaboration among employees of different business functions across group companies. We also engage external experts through various platforms. For instance, we have been religiously organizing Change Talk, a guest lecture event, where we get people from all walks of life to visit Godrej and address our team to spur ideas on new ways of doing things. Younomy:What do you think are the business benefits of applying co-creation principles in product design and development?
Sunderraman: It is time we used social co-creation for creating real business, and social value. The biggest benefit of applying the principles of co-creation lies in the identification of unmet needs. If you take chotuKool, it does not freeze water at minus 20 degree Celsius, it does not have a compressor. Over 90% of users of conventional refrigerators do not freeze water. For most of them all they want is water that is little cold and they need to preserve vegetables and food for a day or two. Hence, with chotuKool we want to create a just right product to meet the actual needs. Besides, it is a representation of sustainable thinking - there are fewer components and low power consumption
Younomy: Have you had an ideation framework when you wanted to find the unmet needs of customers?
Sunderraman:We were greatly benefited by the thoughts of Clayton M. Christensen, who is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and his jobs-to-be-done framework, which primarily says that consumers do not buy products but they hire them to get their jobs done. We stayed in villages, interacted with people in formal co-creation events, and observed their life style to know what jobs they want to do, and how they do them.
Younomy:What type of co-creation opportunities were created for the end users to contribute their ideas to the development of chotuKool project?
Sunderraman: I think co-creation is a continuous process. It has to be integral throughout the product development life cycle. Typically, everything starts from a spark on a broader level concept of a product intuitively. Then there are stages of cold immersion when you find that some of your intuitive ideas have practical relevance, and followed by detailed market feasibility study, prototyping. There is scope for co-creation in all these stages. When we had initial prototypes of chotuKool ready, we gathered around 600 rural people at an interior village in Maharashtra, and introduced some of our thoughts, and collected their feedback on not only the product, but also its value proposition, marketing plan, and so on. But it was not one event. We kept interacting with them at every subsequent stage of product development.
Our team also was represented by people from different backgrounds: there was a student from National Institute of Design who is in our rolls, a manager with extensive experience in designing financial products for rural market, a management graduate in agriculture, a direct marketing expert... Younomy:Why do you have to redefine the distribution structure to reach chotuKool? You are partnering with India Post! Sunderraman:In the past, the centre of focus was on products. It was not the context in which people lived. But if we want to be a disruptive innovator, we have to look at the larger context of life. It is not about products or services but offerings. Customers will not be readily willing to try a new product, though they may find that it addresses an unmet need in a better way.
So there is a need to redefine the entire distribution structure to help customers connect with ideas. When we talk about a new idea, new way of living, we need to have a new disruptive way of reaching out too. Our partnership with India Post, which has a wide presence in rural parts of India, is one way of redefining our distribution network. We are also heavily relying on direct sales - the conversion rates of our direct sales efforts of this new product are on par with those involving a well known, heavily advertised products. That's something that shows the product's success.
Younomy: Can we expect more co-creation projects from Godrej?
Sunderraman: We will be coming up with new, disruptive products in the segments of clean drinking water, furniture and few other segments in the near future. And we are taking the co-creative approach to product design and development.