Search the Internet          Tips  Sites: Finance, Investment

Wipro to incubate employees' ideas

Bipin Chandran in New Delhi

In a bid to boost technology innovation in the company and allow employees to participate in high level decision-making, Wipro has started incubating ideas generated by its employees.

The software major will provide necessary funding and provide the initial hand-holding to the employees to roll out the project.

"Funding would entirely depend on the marketability of the idea. We would typically fund up to 12 months and would be based on achieving certain targets," Anurag Behar, corporate vice-president, Wipro Ltd, said.

According to him, there are about 14 projects that are currently underway as part of this project.

Besides, the company has a dedicated team of about 250 people in both Wipro Technologies and Wipro Infotech working on such projects.

The Azim Premji-promoted Wipro would help its research and development team in identifying the possible market opportunity for the projects.

"We will have out marketing team to work with the research and development team so that they have an idea about the market needs," he said.

"Such a move would help the employees think on a broader scale and also help the company adopt and develop newer technologies. Besides, it would also help the employees in participating on a broader level decision making of the company," Behar said.

When asked about the performance-based funding of the projects, he said, "We have seen it in the past that international technology companies funding core technology development without actually realising the market potential. We do not want this to happen and want each project to have definite market objectives."

"Besides, failure in the early stages are better than a late stage failure after you invest considerable amount of money and time," he said.

The company has identified themes such as content and commerce, home networking and web services as areas where it wants the employees to generate projects and ideas.

"Identifying focus areas would help remove the uncertainty to certain extend. The teams are now working on projects such as a set top box-based networking for home, which will allow people to surf the net, watch television and access phone through one set top box," he said.

Powered by

ALSO READ:
More Money Headlines