New-age Business Leaders Drive Innovation with a Sense of 'Ownership' Open to nurturing ideas bottom-up

About a decade ago, Shruti Shibulal, CEO and Director, Tamara Leisure Experiences, after her stint in banking and finance, ventured into co-founding restaurants and hotels thereafter.

Even then, Shibulal is in a way connected to technology which also is her way of approaching her business now from the time she started it. In her case, "The pandemic gave us a little bit of time to breathe and refocus on how we could re-look at these fundamentals. So technology was one of the first things that we focused on in terms of really rethinking , how we can use technology to communicate better with everybody and to improve our systems."

"One of the things we did was launching an online platform for training and also create curriculum, load it and enable people to access it from anywhere. This is something unprecedented in hospitality. Ever since then we have used the same platform as an assessment tool, where the managers' assessment feeds back into creating more customised personalised training modules for the people in it."

She adds, "Another platform we started somewhat as an internal Facebook that fosters a feeling of ownership and also to improve guest experiences. We seek to democratise the operations."

Joining the conversation is Aditya Bagri, Director, Baggry's India Limited, pioneers of bran, oats and muesli-based health cereals in India, who has a series of innovations to boast of. "The culture for innovation was always there and the seasoned team that I got to work with. As an organisation we had been manufacturing for a long time. My core DNA was manufacturing. We knew food fairly well, we knew how to work with grains. I think the entire consumer lens on the innovative front was what we wanted to marry."

On how he leads innovation now, says Bagri, "Innovation is so well-ingrained and the business itself started with the idea that you wanted to try new categories such as oats and muesli in the early '90s when it was unheard of in India."

"Our DNA comes from the fact that we don't want to do a regular product, we don't want to do something which is the status quo. Everything we do at Baggry's by design has to be better, otherwise it's not worth our time doing it."

"Over the years, we brought the first protein-based breakfast cereal in India, amid technological challenges. The other innovation was that of going for a grain-based kids' breakfast cereal. So we went for oats, whole wheat and rice for a better nutritional experience. Also, way back in 2018 we came up with a packaging innovation for breakfast cereal in a cup with the milk pre-blended inside and all you do is pour water and your cereal would be ready. This was for Indigo Airlines."

On how long to allow for failures when innovating, Bagri says, "Persistence is the key, like in the case of cornflakes we finally succeeded in 2016 after unsuccessful trials since 2011. Patience, persistence and timing it right, is extremely important."

What if changes are to be introduced at a later stage or at a company's growth stage? Is it difficult? "If the culture for innovation is coming from the Board, your founders, who do not shy away from embracing failure then typically that's not a major challenge. Also it depends on how the organisation's DNA is built."

"Now a lot of the innovations are coming bottom-up; we have entered a few categories which were recommendations from our food-tech interns. So, that cultural mindset of the entrepreneurs passing down to someone right at the entry-level of the organisation was something that we really want to nurture."

As for Shruti, "Coming out of Covid, we have tried to keep that sense of innovation going, that sense of entrepreneurship and we are continuously thinking of how we can derive more from these phenomenal ideas that come up from every level of our organisation."