Identify and understand the successes and challenges HCL company is facing with critical thinking as if were a leader in that organization and also making recommendations to the board to further advance the organization by providing a couple of external references to support the recommendations.

In 2020, HCL Technologies Limited (HCL), an information technology (IT) services and consulting company based in India, had more than 150,000 employees across 50 countries delivering holistic services across industry verticals to leading enterprises, including 250 Fortune 500 companies and 650 of Forbes's Global 2000 companies. 1 Changing client expectations and the emergence of disruptive technologies had led HCL's Infrastructure Services Division to form an enterprise technology office (ETO). The ETO was chartered to reinvigorate innovation and build pipelines of growth opportunities in emerging technology domains for the organization. While the ETO had successfully established an innovation ecosystem 2 driven by collaboration among various stakeholders, current efforts and activities were mostly manual and were not yet running at scale. The ETO was aspiring to scale up its activities by transitioning from its role as broker to a new role in orchestration. This required it to standardize and institutionalize processes and systems using technology and automation and to play a larger role in building a holistic culture of innovation across the organization. The ETO was exploring how to achieve this role transition and scale-up aspiration; and reflecting on how to use HCL's automation capabilities to leverage the advantage of platforms. The ETO team was also deliberating how to drive their innovation strategy by focusing on the ecosystem approach of managing innovation. ROLE OF THE ETO The ETO was chartered to drive innovation and thought leadership through its engagements with the innovation ecosystem. Consisting of a team over 25 people, and growing, the ETO's operations spanned across three geographic regions - the Americas, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region-with market access to more than 500 start-ups. The ETO worked closely with more than 10 venture capitalists 3 and multiple country-specific trade missions 4 across the globe. Trade missions were initiatives undertaken by various countries to promote and grow their own countries' start-ups within other countries. Usually, these trade missions operated with country-specific diplomatic missions to help these start-ups partner with enterprises and other businesses in the destination countries. The ETO worked directly under HCL's chief technology officer (CTO) with members holding director-level and lower positions. The ETO was positioned to drive other organizational teams to make decisions ranging from evaluation to adoption at scale of new technology within the organization. The ETO worked closely with other organizational business units including financial services, health care services, and engineering services (see Exhibit 1). It initiated key activities in product and technology research, accelerator and technology incubation, scouting, mergers and acquisitions, and ecosystem innovation for customers, as outlined below. Product and Technology Research: The ETO scouted annual technology and industry trends through activities that included running campaigns and events, both within and outside the organization, to source new and innovative technology and solutions. Accelerator and Technology Incubation: It worked with external partners like venture capital networks and trade missions to explore and evaluate the start-ups in their portfolios or to incubate and support the development of new technology solutions within the organization. Direct Scouting: The ETO also directly scouted and worked with start-ups worldwide to bring new and innovative technologies into HCL Technologies. Mergers and Acquisitions: The ETO was also involved in providing corporate development support for mergers and acquisitions (M\&A) activities. It helped by evaluating technology and business synergy and scanning the market for potential targets through private equity 5 and venture capital firms. Ecosystem Innovation for Customers: This was a critical part of ETO activity. The ETO initiated making innovative solutions from various start-ups available for consumption by HCL's existing clients based on their business requirements. Working under close guidance from the senior leadership, the ETO was responsible for bringing new technologies and breakthrough solutions into the organization and thus building a pipeline for future growth. This required working with innovative technology partners who could enable access to new, cutting-edge technologies. At the same time, it required many partners to ensure that the company had access to a broad range of new technologies and solutions. The ETO firmly believed in adhering to an ecosystem-aligned strategy, where growth was driven and supported by an ecosystem of large innovative partners. The ETO understood the importance of using platform technology to orchestrate and run these many relationships, and it aimed to play an instrumental role in driving innovation by acting as an ecosystem orchestrator between internal teams, external start-up ecosystems, and customers. INNOVATION THROUGH ECOSYSTEMS Ecosystem-driven innovation had been evolving rapidly. 6 Innovation ecosystems had been cited as the drivers of innovation, and organizations were using this model of collaboration to drive entrepreneurship and innovation. 7 By decentralizing the innovation process, organizations were looking at sourcing new ideas by choosing ecosystem innovation strategies that allowed them to stay ahead of their competition. 8 Innovation ecosystems had various stakeholders, including start-ups, venture capitalists, governments, universities, and other corporations; however, a key, focal player in any ecosystem was the ecosystem orchestrator 9-the intermediary who built and maintained connections among various stakeholders and encouraged them to work together. The ecosystem orchestrator drove a decentralized approach to innovation and aimed to enhance the innovation quotient within the organization. 10 BUILDING AN ECOSYSTEM INNOVATION MODEL FOR GROWTH The ETO had experienced mixed success in its corporate entrepreneurship activities. Some of its engagements with start-ups had resulted in HCL successfully winning business deals, and some had not. The reasons for failed business engagements included delays in deal closure, solutions that did not fit the problems, and a lack of continued focus and interest from stakeholders. A typical deal closure cycle could take weeks or months; 11 this business cycle involved working with clients to showcase and propose the required solution. The time it took customers to evaluate proposed solutions and respond varied based on their need and urgency. It was essential to ensure that internal teams and start-up partners continued to be engaged with the customer during this period. Besides this, customers had their own priorities, aligned to their organizational objectives and budgets. At times, internal business teams remained engaged with their prior business commitments, and new startup engagements did not receive the necessary attention. External stakeholders, like start-ups, were also involved in multiple business engagements - with other partners besides HCL- and they prioritized these engagements based on their understanding of the opportunities and deal closure cycles. All stakeholders realized the uncertainty involved in deal closure due to multiple dependencies; however, they expected an agile decision-making process and remained informed on the innovation cycle progress and closure. The ETO recognized the need to gradually enhance the scale and scope of its entrepreneurial initiatives. To enhance the scale and scope of its operations and enhance stakeholders' continued engagement in its initiatives, the ETO gradually adopted the ecosystem innovation model to manage its corporate entrepreneurship objectives. The ETO sensed that the ecosystem innovation approach had immense potential to contribute to the company's innovation-led growth objectives. Gradually, ETO started working closely with internal teams and customers to collate requirements and scouted start-ups to fulfil these requirements. Then it introduced these start-ups and solutions with clients with ecosystem involvement. ETO also continued actively exploring for the latest technologies outside the firm and kept a close watch on potential future technology trends. Technology had been changing fast, and it was important to stay abreast of the latest changes and take these technology changes to customers. These new technology trends helped in bringing new ideas and thought leadership to existing and new clients to innovate and grow their businesses (see Exhibit 2). The ETO's engagements within the technology and start-up ecosystem played a crucial part in fulfilling the requirements of internal teams and customers. For accelerated benefits and powerful impact, it was essential to have constructive collaboration among all stakeholders; this was the fulcrum around which the entire ecosystem revolved. The ETO started organizing its activities to enhance collaboration among stakeholders. To roll out the ecosystem innovation strategy, it initiated three programs: the Joint Exploration Program, the ETO Data Science Hackathon: \#AnyoneCanCode, and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Champs Program. Joint Exploration Program This program was an ETO initiative, where customers got to start their innovation journeys. Customers who subscribed to this program had access to over 500 global start-ups, venture capitalists, a tried and tested innovation framework, an innovation orchestration team, and a platform. Business stakeholders tasked with radical innovation were the usual clients of this program. ETO Data Science Hackathon: \#AnyoneCanCode This program was an open innovation 12 initiative, where students from more than 24 leading academic institutions took part in a three-week exercise to think on concepts and build rapid prototypes on problem statements leading to IT and business convergence for various industry verticals. The hackathon received close to 300 registrations. Al Champs Program AI Champs was an enterprise-level effort to seed, nurture, and harvest ideas by collaborating to create AI solutions to proactively solve futuristic problems. This program included eminent council members from academia and the venture capital community who provided research, advice, and mentorship for AI start-ups. The initiative witnessed over 70 internal teams nominating their solutions from more than 20 global delivery centres. The top three entries were selected and made part of the direct interface access to the innovation ecosystem. ECOSYSTEM INNOVATION PLATFORM The ETO had been exploring the use of technology to complement its efforts and discussed internally how an innovation platform could help propel its ecosystem innovation efforts. After continuous internal brainstorming and discussions, the ETO decided to build its ecosystem innovation platform, a unique technology-based solution that helped to enable and accelerate ecosystem innovation and collaboration efforts within and across the organization. This solution allowed all innovation stakeholders to collaborate and-with help from internal client-facing teams - formalized the process of start-up technology adoption by HCL's clients. The ecosystem innovation platform had a unique framework that spanned activities involving ideation, conceptualization, prototyping, and scale deployment of ideas and innovations. This journey helped customers explore what they needed and evaluate and adopt solutions. The ecosystem innovation platform brought all stakeholders to a common platform and provided visibility across engagements and opportunities. Various stakeholders collaborated through design-thinking-led sprints, 13 to proceed through a homegrown innovation framework consisting of five stages: inspire, ideate, discussed below (see Exhibit 3). The inspire stage helped users - customers or internal teams - to select areas for innovation or choose the latest trends in their areas of interest and suggested potential use cases and related solutions from various start-ups in the ETO portfolio. This functionality also helped users find and select particular start-ups in the area for partnership or future exploration. The ideate stage was a joint exercise undertaken by the ETO and customers to explore various areas of interest and to identify potential areas with specific innovation tasks to be undertaken for further understanding and development. The conceptualize stage enabled a unique joint effort among all stakeholders, where ideas in the ideate phase underwent conceptualization. This effort led to the development of a concept document that was discussed and reviewed with customers. The prototype stage was a decision-making stage that involved developing a prototype and getting feedback from potential users. Go-forward decisions - that is, decisions about whether to close the project or scale up for implementation-were taken based on the prototype feedback. The scale stage was the final step in the ecosystem innovation process. ETO worked with all stakeholders to develop and deploy the solutions - approved prototypes-for the customers. The ecosystem innovation platform helped customers run their innovation journeys to fast-track their innovation processes. The ETO planned to use the ecosystem innovation platform to bring various stakeholders closer and to enhance collaboration between them to achieve the ETO's objectives. One of the most critical goals of the ecosystem innovation platform was to enable transparency and accountability among stakeholders with its dashboard and other tools. The dashboard provided information on various engagement- and opportunity-related aspects and their progress. KEY STAKEHOLDERS OF THE INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM Besides the orchestrator-the ETO - the other key participants of the innovation ecosystem included startups, customers such as client organizations, and internal teams from HCL's business verticals. All of these stakeholders had their own business objectives and expectations of various innovation engagements. Besides innovation engagement, these stakeholders also had existing business commitments to honour. The partner start-ups worked under strict timelines and operated within resource constraints. They were under constant review and pressure from their investors to deliver the promised financial returns. The investor pressure made the start-ups wary of any engagement that ate into their time or took long to complete or close. Simultaneously, due to a scarcity of resources, start-ups were apprehensive about making any dedicated resource commitments or spending too much time on engagements with their partners, unless they were confident of their returns. 14 While start-ups wanted partnerships with large companies to grow their businesses, they were very cautious about engaging with large firms-especially large firms in similar technological domains. Start-ups were worried about their intellectual property being compromised or replicated by the larger partners, and they tried to mitigate this risk through legal arrangements. However, they were still apprehensive about sharing technological knowledge or solutions with these larger corporations as they preferred to avoid legal entanglements. 15 Any deviations from these processes could lead to trouble for the start-up. Investor- or accelerator-type 16 relationships with start-ups could at times lead to better leverage for the ETO than simple business-related partnerships. Innovation decisions were driven mainly by the client organization's priorities and budgets. While the client's organizational priorities were expected to be aligned to innovation and future growth, this was not the case for all. Some client organizations, under competitive pressure, aimed for productivity and efficiency improvements, cost-cutting, and reduced information-technology budgets. At times, client organizations reprioritized their focuses and investments based on market conditions, and this affected their spending on innovation, leading to the postponement of any further investment in innovation, 17 which led to delays in closing deals despite the organizations' need and requirement for innovation. In such scenarios, any new engagement between stakeholders was challenging, and ongoing engagement closures were delayed. Finally, internal teams were vital for the success of any engagement initiated on the ecosystem platform. They were the primary drivers of capabilities that moved solutions from start-ups to client organizations. As internal teams were already involved and working with their existing customers, they knew exact customer requirements and were best suited to adopting start-up innovations and customizing these to their customers' needs. However, internal teams were occupied by existing work commitments and had only a limited time available to engage with start-ups 18 this affected all stakeholders. Addressing the above stakeholder challenges was a daunting task. Due to the involvement of multiple parties with different constraints and objectives, it became difficult to efficiently manage the collaboration-even after rolling out the innovation management technology platform. THE TASK AHEAD OF THE ETO While the ETO was responsible for enhancing growth opportunities and generating value for all stakeholders, including itself, it had multiple challenges at hand. It was important for the ETO to inculcate a holistic culture of innovation for continuous growth, and the office was looking at ways to use internal resources - including human capital-within the organization. While the ETO had already developed the ecosystem innovation platform as an initial step to using technology and institutionalizing innovation and collaboration, it was still far from its desired objective of using the ecosystem innovation platform holistically. The ETO was again exploring available options for enhancing collaboration, creating synergies, and building a culture of innovation to expand this ecosystem innovation effort and create a further level of impact. The ETO was contemplating various options, including enhancing the existing technology-based platform, which had limited features. The primary decision here was about how to use 15 HG.org Legal Resources, "Startups Cautious of Patent Trolls," HG.org Legal Resources, accessed August 25, 2020, https://www.hg.orglegal-articles/startups-cautious-of-patent-trolls-47419; Rich McEachran, "Why Companies Must Go about Sharing IP with Caution," Raconteur, March 20, 2019, https://www.raconteur.net/risk-management/intellectual-property-2019/sharing-ip-caution. 16 Funders Club Inc., "What is a Startup Accelerator or Incubator?," Funders Club, accessed October 25, 2020, https://fundersclub.com/learn/startup-accelerators-and-incubators/startup-accelerators-and-incubators-overview/what-is-astartup-accelerator-or-incubator/. 17 Louis Columbus, "Covid-19's Impact on the Future of IT Budgets," Forbes, August 9, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2020/08/09/covid-19s-impact-on-the-future-of-it-budgets/\#50e4c170318b; Gina O'Connor, "Real Innovation Requires More than an R\&D Budget," Harvard Business Review, December 19, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/12/real-innovation-requires-more-than-an-rd-budget. 18 Matt Hunckler, "12 Challenges Startup Culture Must Overcome in Order to Thrive in 2017," Forbes, March 22, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthunckler/2017/03/22/12-challenges-startup-culture-must-overoome-in-order-to-thrive-in- the technology-based platform for maximum benefit while incorporating the appropriate degree of automation and technology to maintain the right balance between involving technology (automation) and people (manual operations). This balance was crucial in building a culture of innovation. The ETO also realized its changing role and the importance of ensuring that collaborative arrangements across the entire innovation cycle involved the right mix of technology and people. This mix helped in enhancing both organizational network capacity and individual network capability. Another option included getting into strategic engagements with innovation ecosystem partners, either through corporate venturing capital 19 or by running an accelerator for start-ups. The ETO could do this through single or joint partner/customer investments. Finally, the ETO was also contemplating further exploiting the connections senior managers had with partners and across industry and other forums. How could they promote awareness of the ETO's efforts, encourage internal participation, and measure the progress of this effort? The ETO was exploring ways to create new strategic business arrangements and develop reward-based internal and external programs. The opportunity knocking at the door was considerable; the ETO's dilemma related to ensuring it incorporated the right ecosystem innovation strategy ingredients in the day-to-day functioning of the ecosystem innovation platform to ensure the maximum gain. While ensuring that the ecosystem innovation platform was accepted and adopted by ecosystem partners, it was important to ensure that the platform also provided relevant and required information to each stakeholder. Source: Company files. EXHIBIT 2: GARTNER TECHNOLOGY TRENDS, 2016-2020 Note: Al artificial intelligence; apps = applications. Source: Created by the case author using Gartner Inc., "Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2016," press release, Gartner Newsroom, October 6, 2015, www.gartner.com/enewsroom/press-releases/2015-10-06-gartneridentifies-the-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2016; Kasey Panetta, "Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017," Smarter with Gartner, October 18, 2016, https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartners-top-10-technologytrends-2017/; Kasey Panetta, "Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018," Smarter with Gartner, October 3, 2017, https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2018/; Kasey Panetta, "Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019," Smarter with Gartner, October 15, 2018, https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2019/; Kasey Panetta, "Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020," Smarter with Gartner, October 21, 2019, https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2020/. EXHIBIT 3: ECOSYSTEM INNOVATION PLATFORM, FUNCTIONAL APPROACH STAKEHOLDERS Note: ETO = Enterprise Technology Office; Inspiration, Idea, Concept, Prototype, and Scale (ilCPS) was an internally developed and proprietary process framework used by ETO to engage with clients and execute innovation assignments for them. Source: Created by case author using internal company documents