Faculty & Research

Research Productive

Show result

Search Query :
Area :
Search Query :
3722 items in total found

Working Papers | 2012

Indian QSR Industry: Opportunities and Strategies to Harness Them

Piyush Kumar Sinha

In a country with more than a billion people, opportunities in India are abound. This has led to a rapid growth of the QSR industry. However, simultaneously, it has also created a canvass that has many failures and carcass. Several outlets have been closed, a large number are struggling, still a large number are just about surviving and a lot many of them have not been able to find their feet. There are a lot who are successful, but, more importantly, there is almost a complete absence of national chains, except of two cafes, three-four international chains and a few regional chains. This indicates to the fact that just having a lot of opportunities is not enough. These opportunities need to be harnessed and converted into profitable enterprises. This paper is an attempt to understand the industry, its key success factors and draw a framework for developing a road map for success.

Read More

Working Papers | 2012

Values in Vogue: Institutional Pathways for Sustaining Grassroots Innovations for Creating Public Goods

Anil K. Gupta and et al

The institutional pathways through which grassroots struggles and initiatives can not only be articulated but also nurtured are crucial for inclusive development. It has been noted earlier that to institutionalize even a small change, multiple interventions are required at different levels and in different systems. The paper is divided in four parts. In part one, the nature of institutions is discussed in the context of economic situation and socio -ecological conditions The nested nature of institutions provides space for different interest groups to negotiate outcomes of collective preferences. These outcomes may not be optimal given the asymmetry in power and negotiating ability. While discussing the policy options for strengthening institutional environment, need for reshaping the structure of governance is stressed. Two particular recommendations pursued through 13th Finance Commission leading to establishment of District Innovation Fund and Centre for Innovations in Public Systems. The management of technological interface is discussed in the context of continuing inertia in society in dealing with longstanding social problems. An example of techpedia.in as well as IGNITE awards of National Innovation Foundation [NIF] as a way of forging new institutional platforms for promoting creativity of technological youth and young school children. Finally, the institutional context of reduction of transaction costs of various actors is described suggesting the need for mass sourcing of ideas to make society creative, collaborative and compassionate.

Read More

Working Papers | 2012

Innovation, Investment, Enterprise: Generating Sustainable Livelihood at Grassroots through Honey Bee philosophy

Anil K. Gupta

In memory of Dr.C.V.Seshadri, a maverick scientist and a social change agent, it is suggested that a new model for sustainable livelihoods is followed. The ex-ante and ex-post transaction costs of innovators, investors and entrepreneurs will have to be reduced if the new paradigm has to work. The benchmarking of unsolved problems of the society have to be linked with R&D and management institutions so that the societal tendency of living with problems indefinitely is contained. The innovation challenges are recommended to involve masses in solving persistent problems. A reference is made to challenge thrown open by Gandhiji in 1929 offering an award of Rs.1 lakh [worth about Rs.10 crores now] to improve the spinning wheel. In the post-independence India, we have never offered an award of this kind to solve any problem. I describe a framework for building value chain and a horizontal supply chain to reinforce in-situ value addition and people to people exchange and marketing system. Recalling the spread of Buddhism in the eastern Asia, more than 2000 years ago, it is stressed that culture cannot be made culprit. These very countries were heralding new models of economic growth. India has to likewise promote grassroots to global model reversing the current trend of globalization. A plea is also made for a Global Innovation Foundation premised on the philosophy and practice of Honey Bee Network.

Read More

Working Papers | 2012

Conserving, Augmenting and Sharing Water

Anil K. Gupta

There is a huge crisis for water all around the world, certainly in India with groundwater table going down and drinking water selling almost at the rate of toned milk. Who would have imagined two decades ago that a very large number of people in the country would be paying about Rs.15 a litre for drinking water. That also shows that country has abdicated its responsibility to provide quality water in public supplies. This has not happened in a day. Recalling the lecture of K M Munshi, 1953 about the Gospel of Dirty Hand, a plea is made to link hydrological cycle, nutrient cycle and the local community. The concept of land army developed then is still relevant. Institutional and technological innovations for managing water are described next followed by specific policy suggestions for improving water conservation in urban and rural areas. While the recommendations were made in the context of Gujarat, they are equally relevant for any other state or region.

Read More

Working Papers | 2012

Science and Technology for Inclusive Social Development in 12th Five Year Plan

Anil K. Gupta

India has used science and technology for social development right from the beginning of planned development. The first time when television programmes were beamed through satellite, it was for education and not just entertainment. No other country perhaps began the satellite-based transmission in this manner. Likewise, green, white and blue revolution essentially happened through application of science and technology along with appropriate policy and institutional interventions. Having said that, it must be acknowledged that a very large part of Indian population feels excluded from the benefits of S&T applications. This feeling of exclusion has to be overcome if the goal of inclusive development in the Decade of Innovation has to be met. Several strategies recommended in the paper deal with [a] inclusive health [b] biodiversity based knowledge systems and grassroots innovations [c] mining the minds of masses for sourcing and sinking ideas [d] launching CHUNAUTI [Challenges for unfolding and augmenting technological innovations for social development] , [e] engagement with youth [f] handlooms and handicrafts innovation and diffusion, [g] indicators of sustainability science, [h] linking modern S&T with traditional arts and other artisanal goods, [i] sustainable land use and climate change, [j] learning from centenarians, [k] mobilizing employment programmes for mapping the mind and resources and [l] extending core support to S&T institutions for social inclusion and development.

Read More

Working Papers | 2012

Eat, Drink and be Healthy: A Paradigm Shift for Linking Food and Beverages Industry with People's Knowledge and Institutions

Anil K. Gupta

The food and beverages industry has not yet established strong and vibrant linkages with the local communities to develop value added products and share the benefits. The paper lists seven models for building such linkages. The models range from mass sourcing the ideas and rewarding the selected ideas by acknowledging them on the package or otherwise. One can source even the product design from the people and every idea is reciprocated, acknowledged and license deal is negotiated. Likewise, different models involve people at different stages of value chain, or to different degrees and with various kinds of reciprocity.

Read More

Working Papers | 2012

Roadmap for Educational Innovation in Institutions of Higher Learning: Towards Inter-University Centre for Innovation

Anil K. Gupta

It is ironic that while searching for models that promote excellence, we have not made the outstanding teachers and researchers the hub of future reforms. The fact that in any field of social investigation or higher education, the top few ranks are always occupied by public institutions has not influenced the advocacy for private institutions in the name of improving quality. Surely, mere ownership cannot influence quality. But, having achieved quality, public institutions need to be supported. The roadmap for educational innovations looks at the initiatives taken at the level of students and faculty. The concept of faculty governance has been diluted in many institutions of higher learning. The bureaucratic structures have sapped lot of energy of the students as well as faculty. It does not matter whether people perform because meritocracy itself has suffered a great deal in appointments to various positions, consultation for policy and institutional changes and for creating future vision. Time has come to arrest these tendencies and rebuild the educational edifice. A proposal for establishing an inter-university centre on innovation is made to operationalize various suggestions.

Read More

Working Papers | 2012

FDI in Retail: A Global Perspective

Srikant Gokhale and Piyush Kumar Sinha

Allowing FDI in multi brand retailing has recently generated tremendous euphoria for some and fear for others. It is based on the notion that it will open floodgates for foreign retailers to invest and will change the retail landscape forever in India. When India is the only country in the world where the top five business houses with market caps running into trillions are into retail business, this issue becomes much more interesting. Most retailers in other countries do not feature even in the top 10 large firms. Also the evidence of last 20 years of globalization by retailers shows that there is no such case of domination of foreign retailers wherever markets for global retailers have opened up. Only limited numbers of retailer have entered into these markets that too with lot of caution as they have realised that retail thrives on local knowledge rather than transplanting global retail concepts, strategy and formats. The experiences in other emerging economies have shown that fewer foreign retailers have been successful while several failed as they could not comprehend local nuances, customer insights and fight local competition. In fact, in many countries the local retailers have better market shares, sizes and performances.

Read More

Working Papers | 2012

Path Relinking for Single Row Facility Layout

Ravi Kothari and Diptesh Ghosh

The single row facility layout problem is the problem of arranging facilities with given lengths
on a line, while minimizing the weighted sum of the distances between all pairs of facilities. The
problem is NP-hard. In this paper we present path relinking algorithms to solve large sized
instances of the problem. We use three different metaheuristics to generate sets of good quality
initial solutions and subject the solutions in these sets to path relinking. We present our
computational experience on 43 benchmark instances with up to 110 facilities.

Read More

Working Papers | 2012

Sensitivity Analysis for the Single Row Facility Layout Problem

Ravi Kothari and Diptesh Ghosh

The single row facility layout problem (SRFLP) is an important combinatorial optimization
problem where a given set of facilities have to be arranged in a single row so as to minimize the
weighted sum of the distances between all pairs of facilities. Sensitivity analysis for the SRFLP
has not been reported in the literature till date. In this paper we present closed form expressions
for tolerances of all SRFLP parameters. We also present heuristics to obtain upper bounds on
the values of these tolerances. Our computational experiments show that the heuristics obtain
exact values of tolerances for small sized instances. For larger sized instances, our heuristics
obtain good quality bounds on the values of tolerances for a large fraction of the problem
parameters. We also present a tightening procedure to improve on the upper bounds generated by our heuristics.

Read More
IIMA