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Case Study

Cisco India (A): Innovation in emerging markets

By Charles Dhanaraj, Ivy Buche, Rishikesha T. Krishnan and Srivardhini Jha

12 pages

June 2015

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Reference: IMD-7-1657

Case A describes the challenges a multinational corporation, Cisco Systems Inc., faces in an emerging market in developing new products specific to local needs. Dr Ishwardutt Parulkar and his team at Cisco’s Indian subsidiary in Bangalore had identified a promising concept that could potentially become the company’s first product developed end-to-end at the India site. They had to address three critical issues: How to define the right product to address the specific needs of telecom network customers in the emerging market? How to build the business case for approval from the headquarters in the US? How to compensate for the significant gaps in the Indian ecosystem that was not fully mature in terms of partners and skills required to develop such a product? Case B presents how the Cisco team resolved the new product development challenges. The success of the new Advanced Services Router (ASR) 901 would mark a milestone in Cisco’s journey of evolution of engineering capability in emerging countries into the next phase of innovation and thought leadership.

Learning Objective

1) Identify key challenges in developing a mainstream product from concept to completion in an emerging market. 2) Understand essential factors for building subsidiary R&D capabilities for mainstream product development. 3) Introduce the Technology Champion framework, which serves to bring out innovation aspirations in a subsidiary R&D team.

Keywords

Economics, Research and Development, Network, Capability, Emerging Country, Leverage, Relationship, Headquarter, New Product Development

Settings

Asia, India
Cisco Systems, Services, Business Management Services, Communication, Manufacturing, Technology, Information Technology, Information Services
2010–2011

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English

Related material

Teaching note, Video

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