Breakthrough innovation and platform leadership: a case of super app from India

Abstract

Leveraging select factor advantages, several firms of Indian origin (FIOs) are doing quite well in emerging industries, including rapidly growing segments such as apps and digital platforms (DPs). Yet, gaps between apps by FIOs and super apps in China and other countries are quite vast on multiple dimensions. The entry of ‘large industrial houses of India’, with diverse capabilities across member companies, in relevant segments can help evolve innovation platforms. Particularly, it can help catch-up on critical capabilities related to management of technology and innovation (MoT) that demand deep talent and finance pools. In this short case study, efforts are made to clarify the context and dilemmas faced by top leaders of a firm, synthesized for a chief technology officer (CTO). The case provides an exciting opening context for learners of management and strategy, particularly experienced executives, as well as top leaders in firms, governments and bureaucracy. It also has a section summarizing high importance dilemmas for researchers and academicians to undertake exciting studies.

Appendices

Appendices

Appendix A1: Working definitions of key terms

Corporate flexibility

Capabilities of a business corporation (can be an industrial house, trading house {e.g. sogo sosha}, or orchestrator through financial linkages {e.g. Keiretsu, Chaebol,…}, or even state owned enterprises (SOEs {e.g. in China}) to leverage diverse capabilities (e.g. products to services, manufacturing to financial, software to hardware).

Digital platforms: A building block, providing an essential function to a technological system—which acts as a foundation upon which other firms can develop complementary products, technologies or services. DPs can bring together two or more types of firms, SBUs, organisations or market actors and can scale-up rapidly, if able to leverage network effects (Adapted from Gawer et al. 2002, Cusumano et al., 2020).

Digital platform capability: Firms ability to make connections with other firms using online platforms and orchestrate all the different resources and activities at a large scale during the process to enhance competitiveness, ideally international competitiveness on carefully selected factors of high relevance for a given context (Adapted from Shi et al. 2020, Momaya 2019).

Platform Owner: Platform owners are the focal ecosystem actors, who are responsible for the platform’s architecture and facilitate access and value creation through governance mechanisms.

International competitiveness

International competitiveness of a firm can be defined as the capability of a firm to design, engineer, produce, service a product or service or undertake above or other activities of choice on industry value system much better than competitors on relevant factors of competitiveness (Momaya, 2001). Above activities may be undertaken in one or multiple countries, but the relative level of international competitiveness may be evaluated on criteria such as net foreign exchange earnings (absolute, as well as percentage of net sales).

In context of platform firms, the relevant activities that help scale-up the platform in domestic and international markets can be of higher focus.

Organisational fitness

Organisational fitness is a concept that transcends traditional profitability measures by including an organisations dynamic capabilities to be innovative for continuous organistional survival and prosperity. Organisational fitness can be measured in two ways (adapted from Leibold, 2002):

Internally: looking within the organisation

By its ability to self-organize internally quickly and effectively in the face of change. This ability ranges from (1) inefective self organising that freezes in a place, through (2) an ability to keep pace with today’s rapid rate of change but not to lead this change, and culminates in (3) an ability to reorganize much faster than others.

Externally: looking externally.

By adaptation an entity exhibits within its changing context…

Appendix A2: Emerging issues of high importance

While emerging countries take baby steps on challenge levels such as SuperApps, there are several emerging issues and topics for studies where huge gaps in knowledge exist and provide high-potential for studies of different type—from micro-studies to Ph.D. level projects. We cluster issues under following heads: Macro, meso to micro level. Only more relevant micro-level issues were discussed in main part; macro-level and meso-level issues are discussed here.

• Macro-level:

  Excessive dominance by ‘Big Tech’ have created different approaches to ‘rein in’ by big tech countries. For instance, the countries in the European Union tried to protect emerging and local firms through tech regulations such as data privacy. Such regulation could have created baclout for tech giants such as Meta Platforms Inc. thousands of other firms that rely on free flow of information across the Atlantic (Bloomberg, 2022). The EU and the US tried to break the deadlock through a new data transfer pact. China has different approach to rein in tech gaints such as Alibaba and Tencent, when it seemed that imbalances were happening. Many emerging countries in other continents have less clarity on approach that can work for them.

  Since regulation can create major obstacles for so called super apps, some companies may have chosen to adapt strategies such as “Hidden Champions” (Simon, 201X), a concious strategy adapted by many companies across countries. Since, super app often creates a notion that the firm is attempting to create oligopolies, even the big-tech companies having apps that come close to what super apps are supposed to deliver have consciously shied away from calling their apps super apps. Since, there are hardly any firms of Indian origin (FIOs) that have such technologies or other key competitiveness assets (Momaya, 2001) and the landscape in India is hyper-competitive and hence more VUCA, even most capable FIO or even industrial house should be willing to take toughest challenges to emerge a domestic winner, where real strings are in hands of less visible players. Who are such players keen on India and what are their game plans, capabilities and cooperative strategies (e.g. Momaya, 2011) can provide some exciting topics for studies.

• Meso-level

  Industrial houses such as Tata’s have firms with diverse capabilities across several manufacturing and services industries. Some of them have high or growing international competitiveness (e.g. TCS,……or Tata motors, Tata Steel). While earlier notions of corporate flexibility where mostly focused on synergies of conglomerate (e.g. based on financial criteria, cross-holding,…), adventures across industry boundaries by tech giants (e.g. from the USA) indicate potential of gaining competitiveness in even polar industries. For instance, starting from a book store and expanding to be an e-com giant, Amazon has been entering and disrupting diverse industries incl. in hardware (e.g. electronics) to space. Their counterpart such as Flipkart many have capabilities, but may not have been able to consider such less-related diversification for several reasons. What are such reasons constraining advances on hardware products (can be from retaining, servicing,…to getting contract manufactured abroad) for FIOs? For instance, IH such as RIL entered in hardware through pilots such as LYF (which became a top selling brand of mobile phones for some time in India), but seems to have stagnated prematurely. Can more experienced His such as Tata can go longer distances with planned SuperApp TataNeu? What capabilities across different businesses may create synergies that can be leveraged for international competitiveness of Neu?

Appendix A3: Limitations and topics for exploration and adventure

Like most mini-cases of this nature, this case also has limitations. Some of the limitations may also open up opportunities as topics for exploration and adventure. Here are just few high potential examples of the topics.

• Focus of the discussion above was on enablers of competitiveness mostly at ‘Firm level’ or ‘Industrial house level’ that can facilitate BO or CU for innovation platforms. In some contexts, select dimensions of competitiveness at ‘Industry level’ or ‘Cluster level’ or ‘ecosystem level’ (including supply chains, industry value systems {e.g. GVC}) may become important. Advanced countries such as Japan often have higher maturity of perspectives on industrial competitiveness. For instance, Li, Ishii and Kameoka (2001) proposed a conceptual framework of cooperation and competition (including foundations and indicator system). They mentioned that while technology could be emulated and overtaken, quality cooperation interwined in sophisticated relational networking of information, knowledge, materials and organizations can provide better knowledge-based sustainable advantage. Such perspectives may be difficult to implement in Indian contexts, but ‘Early Steps in relevant direction’ may be important to evolve “Cooperative Strategies” (e.g. Momaya, 2009) for sustainable enterprises, cities and clusters.

• Break-out or catch-up on journey towards innovation platform (can be from products or transaction platforms) for EMNEs may benefit from concepts such as ‘platform overthrow’ (e.g. Thomas et al., 2021). Probability of platform overthrow seems better in transaction platforms. However, bigger opportunities for research may be in finding drivers of overthrow in innovation platforms, where gaps in capabilities of EMNEs and hence opportunities for improvement (OFIs) are bigger.

• Founders, intrapreneurs capable of transforming self, teams and ventures are emerging as major driver of competitiveness of firms and industrial houses. For instance, Digital technologies have swept the world and some proponents of ‘Digital Transformation’ (e.g. Westerman et al., 2014) have highlighted that even large companies in traditional industries—from finance, manufacturing to pharmaceuticals—are trying to gain strategic advantage through digital. A critical success factor identified was “leaders capable of managing how of the transformation”. What can be early indicators of leaders with such capabilities?

• Some Indian experts have highlighted the trinity of Jandhan-Aadhar-Mobile (popularly called JAM), as some of the most transformative digital platforms with massive impact on way payments can be processed. For instance, many believe that Unified Payments Interface (UPI) created by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) as the most disruptive payments platform in the world (Balakrishnan, 2022). While it certainly disrupted growing businesses such as international card companies, there is a need to think about next levels of transformative digital payments systems and ecosystems that can be world class and contribute significantly to competitiveness of MSMEs and other firms and organisations. What cooperative strategies can help evolve such systems and competitiveness can provide some exciting topics for studies?