Identifying Tata's Innovation DNA
Tata, a hugely diversified major global enterprise headquartered in Mumbai/ India, has acquired a reputation for creating low-cost business model innovations, also for people at the base of the pyramid. 
Tata NanoTheir Nano, a $2,500 four-passenger city car which entered the domestic market in 2008 has received a lot of attention, won several innovation prizes and by mid-2009 gained a share of 17% of India’s automobile market with just one model. Tata’s raw materials online auctioning platform mjunction which was founded in 2001 is India’s largest e-commerce company today, with 400 employees in 12 locations and almost € 3.3bn of transaction value in FY2010.
Sunil Sinha, head of the TATA Global Innovation Forum has asked the ICCL to conduct a qualitative study, in which three innovation successes and three innovation failures will undergo an in-depth analysis in order to identify factors in TATA’s corporate DNA which are responsible for their extraordinary success in low-cost business model innovation. From September through November 2010 ICCL researchers will conduct interviews with 30-40 TATA representatives and business partners and analyze documents from the projects in question to enter these data in an iterative qualitative process of analysis. The target is to distill conclusions about the specific success factors of low-cost business model innovation at TATA.
