| | DECEMBER 2020915 markets in the Asia Pacific region. Through the research, organizations' maturity was mapped and organizations were grouped in four stages - tradi-tionalist (stage 1), novice (stage 2), adaptor (stage 3) and leaders (stage 4).Released on Tuesday, the India findings of the study `Culture of Innovation: Foundation for busi-ness resilience and economic recovery in Asia Pa-cific' highlighted that a large majority of business decision makers agree that innovation is a neces-sity to staying resilient in a crisis. The study revealed that the pandemic compelled a spirit of innovation to build resilience in the new normal. It also made inno-vation easier for organizations in the country, as per the findings. 64 percent of the respondents agreed that innovation had become easier in the post COV-ID era, as opposed to only 32.5 percent of Indian businesses prior to the pandemic."Innovation is no longer an option, but a neces-sity. We have seen how the recent crisis has spurred the need for transformation, for organizations to adapt and innovate in order to emerge stronger," stated Rajiv Sodhi, COO, Microsoft India, while re-leasing the study findings. Rajiv added that tech-led innovation has become very critical to the life cycle called respond, recover and reimagine.He also stated that "Most of the companies which are innovation and technology led are reimagining how their processes are run. A culture of innovation is crucial to every organization".The thrust on digital adoption has been ramped up, with organizations focusing on increasing the percentage share of their revenue from digital prod-ucts and services. 78 percent of the respondents have stated that they are speedily embracing digital capabilities. According to the study, businesses in India are aiming to increase their revenue from digi-tal products and services from one third (36 percent) at present, to half (50 percent) in the next 3 years.Such acceleration of technology, Rajiv highlight-ed, is happening across sectors, including the small and medium businesses. "The trend of adoption of Cloud had started prior to COVID itself which low-ers the barrier to tech adoption. A lot of Cloud solu-tions come with easy to adopt trial features and their demand has scaled up in COVID. It is a function of both ease of tech adoption and the necessity of tech adoption which is driving such trends across all sec-tors," he added.Even the future plans have a focus on tech-led growth. Organizations in India (45 percent) indicated that they will focus on technology as most essential for business resilience and recovery. Some of the practices, the report said, will include developing a culture that promotes investing in disruptive tech-nologies. The other area of focus will be People. In the coming year, 18.5 percent businesses in India plan to focus on embracing risks and driving inno-vation through ongoing learning, and the right talent and skills. Besides this, the study revealed the best practices that organizations can adopt to progress across people, technology, data and process. Forti-fying resilience with technology, investing in people's capabilities and skills, leveraging data to increase competitiveness and redesigning processes to con-tinuously drive innovation were some of the recom-mendations from the study. Microsoft is utilizing its platforms and services to enable a culture of innova-tion among Indian enterprises across retail, IT/ITeS, and healthcare, among other sectors. The thrust on digital adoption has been ramped up, with organizations focusing on increasing the percentage share of their revenue from digital products and services
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