How Wipro applies its thought to innovation

Can you give me glimpses of Wipro’s innovation journey through the years?

It’s important to know that we started as a vegetable oil company. Wipro’s name stands for Western India Vegetable Products. Right from here, Wipro has been continuously innovating. That’s how Wipro was able to apply its capabilities to transform itself from a vegetable oil to a consumer care company. It shows that our innovation journey started even before we got into IT.

In the 1980s, when IBM moved out of India, Wipro saw an opportunity. Very few know that Wipro started with its own operating system called W-Dos and it created its own PCs, servers, emailing systems and PCs to suit Indian conditions. We came into IT as a ‘Product Company for India.’ We were a strong R&D group.

Did that seeding take us somewhere? The unique strength gained during that time was very useful. It took us into the new phase of application development and into
a new phase of innovation.

1983 onwards we got into networking solutions, IPs around that and into the area of software development and software services. That is when global expansion started. We were selling out IPs to product companies. With internet boom we innovated further, created an organization called 0-1 – a purely internet business. It was looking at providing internet channel to procurement related businesses. We adapted to create a new business here, something like e-choupal now. That strength of this IP is now built into our consulting business.

Has the R& D focus given you the edge?

The whole R&D focus, since we started, has made us the world’s largest third party R & D services provider today. This strength led us to provide IPs by product equipment vendors worldwide to get speed to the market.

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