ET Innovation awards: Meet the winners of ET Innovation Awar…

All companies innovate to survive, but some innovate to lead, either through small changes or via big ideas. The ET Innovation Awards 2020 showcases best out-of-the-box thinking and innovation. Meet the ideas whose time has come.

Most innovative company: RPG Group

Mumbai-based tyres-to-information technology conglomerate RPG Group seeded its agenda of becoming an innovation leader in 2016 when teams across the company were given business problems and asked to come up with innovative solutions. Chairman Harsh Goenka, who accepted the award for Most Innovative Company from The Economic Times, said this initiative generated “unprecedented momentum” as young employees showcased talent and diversity of thought.

“Be it product innovation, business model or process innovation, our philosophy of innovation is based on the tenet of making a positive impact on business, our customers and communities,” Goenka said, accepting the award on behalf of innovators at the RPG Group. He added that the Group doesn’t just cherish radical innovation but also basic, efficiency-centric processes and it even has a special category called Supernova that celebrates failed innovations, as it has made innovation a part of its culture.

Most innovative startup: Rategain

RateGain is a software company that builds solutions to streamline operations and sales for travel and hospitality companies. Founder Bhanu Chopra, who accepted the award for the Most Innovative Startup from The Economic Times, said that “innovation is critical”, especially when the travel and hospitality sector has been so badly hit by the pandemic.

“We are using robust AI and ML models to help our customers acquire and retain their customers. Today, we have a bigger responsibility of creating innovative solutions that help the industry tide through the crisis,” Chopra said, adding that the award was a testament to the hard work and commitment of every member of the RateGain team. The company, which has over 250,000 travel and hospitality businesses as its customers, said it was making a commitment to innovate on their behalf with its new initiative called RG Labs.

New product innovation: Dozee

Thanking the jury of The Economic Times’ innovation awards and minister RK Singh for recognising its product Dozee, Mudit Dandwate reminisced about his journey that started almost five years ago with a vision to simplify healthcare and make it more accessible.

Dozee is India’s first contactless, remote, vitalsmonitoring device that tracks key health parameters such as heart rate, respiration rate, oxygen saturation, sleep stages and stress recovery with medical-grade accuracy. Sensors on the device capture micro-vibrations produced by the body every time the heart pumps blood, during inhalation, exhalation, muscle twitches, tremors and body movements.

“In testing times like Covid-19, we were able to deliver on our promise by enabling multiple hospitals and care centres with our stepdown ICU services,” Dandwate said, and thanked his entire team.

People innovation joint winner: Amazon India

Amazon India won the People Innovation Award for its experiment with its voice recognition software Alexa Pod on its Hyderabad campus. In August last year, Amazon inaugurated its Hyderabad campus, its first outside the US and the single largest building in terms of area and headcount for the company globally. The team developed the software that answers questions ranging from leave policies to new-hire tips, leadership principles and information about the campus.

“Alexa Pod has already answered thousands of questions from Amazonians. With employees working from home, this skill is easily accessible to them by their smartphones. What we are noticing is that voice is becoming an increasingly popular way to simplify the lives of our employees. We continue to iterate on this experience and expand this extensively,” said Amit Agrawal, country head for India at Amazon.

People innovation joint winner: Tech Mahindra

Thanking The Economic Times for the People Innovation Award, MD and CEO CP Gurnani said it was a “genuinely strong dose of motivation” because the award recognised the fundamental traits of the IT services company, which are rooted in celebrating innovation.

“The differentiator of Tech Mahindra has always been how we innovate, how we deliver value to our employees and, more importantly, how we converge together innovation and people to make a unique customer experience,” Gurnani said, accepting the award on behalf of 125,000 Tech Mighties and the company’s board members.

Innovation to drive sustainability: The Phi Factory

The Phi Factory is a socially conscious research and innovation initiative that has set itself a goal of coming up with one social innovation for every three commercial products it builds. Accepting the award from The Economic Times, cofounder and CEO Meghana Jale said the company strives to provide both “environment and economy” with all its products.

“With the motivation received from this award, we’re confident we can continue the momentum and the spirit of innovation,” Jale said, dedicating the award to the team at The Phi Factory. The company’s first product was an additive named G-FP, which makes paper lighter by 21% and reduces production costs by 9%. “We have produced about 2,500 tonnes of G-FP graded craft paper, which means we have saved 7,500 trees globally from being consumed into paper form,” she said.

Business model innovation: Finserv Markets

Finserv MARKETS is a subsidiary of Bajaj Finserv and a prominent lender that offers loans, insurance, investment, payments and EMI options on purchases. Crediting and congratulating his two-year-old team for their technology innovation, CEO Rakesh Bhatt accepted the award.

“We innovate for the customers by curating financial services products and solutions which we offer on our marketplace… And at the same time, we also need to deliver a highly successful platform business model,” he said. Bhatt said the success of Finserv lies in the large set of partners across the ecosystem who help meet customer needs.

Marketing & brand innovation: HDFC Bank

HDFC Bank, India’s largest lender by market capitalisation, has built a personalised experience for each customer and in the process moved beyond just being a bank to become a one-stop solution for banking, investments, loans, trading and even paying taxes.

Former MD and CEO Aditya Puri, who accepted the award for Marketing and Brand Innovation from The Economic Times, said the “convergence of telecommunication, computing and media” over the past few years has been a game changer. He added that companies that leveraged this to build more personalised products for consumers, reduce expenditure and ensure good delivery time and again have added billions in their market cap.

“The change we brought about in the service offering and the experience improved brand salience and brought about proper mind recall for the customer. We also used this same ability to further our reach to improve our financial inclusion and give back to society,” added Puri.

AI innovation: DronaMaps

DronaMaps is a startup that leverages imagery collected through drones to create largescale 3D maps. Accepting the award from The Economic Times, founder and CEO Utkarsh Singh said to be recognised by the financial daily for the work in drone data and AI was “an extremely humbling experience”.

“We truly believe it can revolutionise how geospatial intelligence is consumed in emerging countries,” Singh said, dedicating the award to his team and mentors. Singh added that he is driven by the vision to democratise large-scale drone-based mapping that aids use-cases from development to disaster management. “The data densities we operate at are in the range of billions of points per 100 acres and that informs our geometric deep-learning algorithms with truly massive 3D data sets,” he said.

Process innovation: Sterlite Power

“Over 2 billion people in the world don’t have access to reliable power. We find that the real issue behind this is not generation of power but transmission and distribution (T&D) of power,” said CEO Pratik Agarwal, explaining his mission statement behind Sterlite Power. Agarwal said that as the world goes on to solve this challenge, it also has to fight climate change.

“This is only possible with innovation in T&D,” he said. Sterlite Power has pioneered robotic technology for the installation of optical ground wire on high voltage power transmission lines. Thanking The Economic Times, Agarwal said, “We are delighted because recognition like this encourages us to work harder and harder, question the status quo, and move us inch by inch to our mission of delivering power to 2 billion people around the world.”