'India should aspire for 10% growth a year'

India should aspire for 10 per cent growth and 10 million new jobs a year to emerge as an economic super-power by 2020, according to Dr C K Prahalad, Professor of Corporate Strategy at Michigan Business School.

Addressing the CII Ninth Partnership Summit in hyderabad on Tuesday, Prahalad outlined the strategy for India and Indian Industry to achieve sustained growth over the next 18 years.

"India and the Indian industry should aim at having some part of Indian manufacturing or service skills into every product or service sold around the globe if the country wants to achieve an annual 10 per cent growth. 

"If Indian companies can do all this, then India will be well on its way to achieving a sustained GDP growth of 10 per cent and 10 million new jobs a year.  Without this high aspiration, there is no way that the world will recognise India to be a superpower," he observed.

He said the Indian industry needed to use its emerging competence base, have global scales and use the emerging opportunities that customers were creating for companies, when they moved to an experience fulfillment strategy.

When customers wanted an experience, they combined many different products and services. Earlier the focus used to be on solutions and before that, on products.

Companies, he said, would have to change the "firm-centric" view of markets and realise that customers were defining what markets they chose to be, especially when many products had too many features that only confused their users.

They had to recognise that a company and a consumer were creating value together. Specifically, Indian business could combine its skills in information technology with its domain knowledge in traditional industries such as automotive, cement, and even healthcare.

Dr Prahalad said that many Indian companies were focussing on best practices but this was only going to allow companies to catch up. To lead, and to leapfrog competition, Indian business had to create next practices, as opposed to best practices.

These skills included the ability to recruit four thousand people a year, training them in languages and cultures, teaching people to imitate another culture, ability to combine off-site and on-site management skills and the ability to keep moving people from project to project. 

Many US companies did not have these skills. They also could not offer some services, such as national long distance telephony at prices that Indian companies were offering.

Similarly, India has strengths in low-cost manufacturing in the area of pharmaceuticals where more than 17,000 companies had knowledge of making fine chemicals.

"The Indian industry should not look at using cost as its unique selling point; rather they should recognise these multiple talents and charge accordingly," he suggested.

Dr Prahalad said if India continued to grow at 5 per cent till 2020 and China continued to grow at 10 per cent till 2020, then India's GDP and per capita income would have both risen respectably, but China would then be eight times India's size.

He drew on history to show that India had achieved high aspirations. In 1929, the goal of Purna Swaraj was set before the country and this was achieved in 18 years. The new objective should be to grow so fast in the next 18 years that we no longer have to refer to poverty in India, he added.