Unconference 2022

Culture is considered as the decisive factor for innovation by all companies – successful and unsuccessful! Neither has ever answered the question, “What is the innovation culture & how (not) to create?”. Some people view the culture of Innovation in direct conflict with other behaviours that organizations want to drive. In this session, Ravi will focus on the subject of innovation culture and drive home some of these points with examples of Open Innovation, Rewarding Failures, Use of PULL instead of PUSH in the Innovation Value chain and making it Middle-Top and Middle-Down which is a slow and organic process instead of the traditional Top-down (which is undoubtedly quicker, but not more effective).

Ravi Arora is a Vice President – Group Innovation, Tata Sons. He works with Tata companies to enhance the effectiveness of their innovation programs. He has conceptualized Tata Group level programs like Tata InnoVista, Tata InnoVerse, Tata Ideas, Tata InnoMeter and Challenges Worth Solving. He facilitates Tata companies in experimenting, embedding and maturing these programs. Ravi started his career at Tata Steel as a maintenance engineer. Later, he initiated & led the Knowledge Management program at Tata Steel, which was recognized as a Best Practice company by APQC, USA and won the MAKE (Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise) award. Ravi is actively engaged with business schools like INSEAD, SMU for joint research projects related to behavior science. He is the author of two books: (1) Making Innovations Happen (Penguin, 2015) and Igniting Innovation: The Tata Way (HarperCollins, 2019). Ravi earned his BE from IIT Roorkee PGPX from XLRI.