Comments made by KV Kamath, CEO of  ICICI at a meeting we both attended last week-end

The mega opportunity for Indian businesses is to devise products and services that  connect rural producers and users to urban Indian markets. This often requires partners in rural India. 

However, dealing with this scale requires technology enabled platforms that can reach out to this market of millions of users and partners.

To use technology in India you must run it at 10% of the cost it takes in the West because the Indian customer ticket size is 10% of that in the West….when you go to rural India with services you need to run technology at 10% of the Indian urban cost.

Rules for Success
Ideas gathered last week-end at a TIE Advisory Council meeting in Bangalore

Narayana Murthy ( Infosys):

A test of a good idea is whether it can be put in one simple sentence that makes sense to your customer. In the early days of Infosys he tried things like ‘We will provide a better user interface to a mainframe application’, or “We will provide a better connection between a terminal and a mainframe’ but it did not work. When he started using things like ” We will help you reduce cost by…”  or “We will help you reduce ccycle time…” it started to work.

A second test is to ask- Is the market ready for this new idea? Unless it is, your idea will fail. The exception to this is when you introduce ideas with market discontinuity like Netscape or Amazon did.

A third test is whether the team put together to execute the idea has members whose skills are mutually exclusive and at the same time is collective exhaustive. In the early days of Infosys, his own skill  was in finance and strategy, and each of his partners had a core skill- Nandan in Sales and Marketing, Raghavan in HR, Kris in Technology and the last threewere extraordinary software project managers.

He believes a common theme in successful businesses is the founders readiness to pospone personal financial gratification to the long term- this comes from a readiness for self sacrifice