How enterprises benefit from startup agility & innovation

Vedanta, as many would know, is a mining giant. It mines iron ore, zinc, silver, aluminum, copper. It’s into oil & gas and steel. Any breakdown of its machinery impacts production. Some time ago, it started working with a startup that had a predictive maintenance solution. The solution worked well in one line of production, and when others in the conglomerate saw the results, they too wanted to use it. “RoI (return on investment) was coming quickly, because if you’re able to predict faults and take necessary action right on time, you are not just saving cost, you’re actually increasing your production by reducing your unplanned downtime,” says Amitesh Sinha, VP & head of Corporate Venture Capital & Vedanta Spark, whose job it is to identify startups that the group can work with.
Sinha says the solution now is being scaled across the group. “We’ve placed large purchase orders. I’ve been told that once it gets fully deployed, Vedanta would be the most digitised metal mining company in the world with so many sensors looking after each and every equipment across business units,” he says.
And now, since the sensors are collecting so much data, Vedanta is co-creating another solution with the startup – one that combines this data with all of the company’s other data around raw materials, etc, to find ways to improve overall production levels. This, Sinha says, is being piloted in one of the steel plants.
This and other such success stories have encouraged Vedanta chairman Anil Agarwal to push the group to make working with startups an integral part of company culture.
This kind of open innovation and co-creation model is a core part of how Silicon Valley functions. Enterprises gain from the innovation and agility of startups, while startups gain from the business and scale that enterprises provide. It’s a model that the Union ministry of electronics & IT (MeitY) and nasscom together are trying to replicate through a body called MeitY nasscom CoE (centre of excellence). The CoE matches enterprises with startups. Sanjeev Malhotra, who leads this body, said at a webinar we organised in association with MeitY nasscom CoE, that they now have a portfolio of about 1,500 startups that are working or could work with enterprises. “The concept has really picked up. So much so that we have even seen some smaller companies working with us. We have a division for SMEs too. It’s needed especially on the manufacturing side, where technology definitely needs to be updated,” he said, adding that for every use case “we have four or five startups who are there to offer solutions.”

Biopharma company Astra Zeneca’s Indian arm was one of the early ones to work with startups in India. And now they are doing so across a range of areas.
Siva Kumar Padmanabhan, MD & head of global innovation & technology centre at AstraZeneca India, said initially they had a number of startups in the early diagnostics area, where they used imaging technology with AI to diagnose conditions like lung cancer, and chronic kidney dis ease. After the success of these solutions in India, AstraZeneca scaled it to many countries.
Now there are ongoing collaborations with startups on solutions around managing conditions, and medication adherence. They are even working with startups to make their buildings green, and ensure safety in factories with vision technologies. And now they are looking for innovations in drug discovery and speeding up clinical trials.
Sriram S, head of factory automation and industrial division at Mitsubishi Electric India, said they have a digital innovation centre that identifies startups to work with. He said there are a number of areas where they are co-innovating or looking to do so. These are in areas like robotics, predictive maintenance, and getting the right combination of material properties to get the best quality metal out, and reduce the amount of energy required to make it.
Ramesh Kalanje, vice president at cyber resilience company Commvault, said they are working with a startup that’s brought a lot of value to Commvault’s development toolset. “The product offers a bunch of features that enhance our code reviews, something that traditionally was a manual task. It has saved 30% of our engineering folks’ time,” he said.
Marriage challenge
However, there will invariably be challenges when enterprises start working with startups. Padmanabhan said it’s important for startups to understand the enterprise’s business context. Kalanje said the first thing they do is talk to the startup to make sure there is a good correlation between what they’re trying to achieve and the problem that Commvault is trying to solve.
Everybody also noted that startups will need to have a lot of patience. “We have our own inertia around which we work,” Sriram said. Very unlike an agile startup.