Inspiration

Accelerating SME growth and scale through exploring the potential of global net zero markets

James Taplin shares an insight into Innovate UK’s Global Incubator Programme in Hyderabad, India

We talk often about how the Local Authority work you’re all doing is one half of the full Net Zero Living programme, but we don’t always talk enough about the other half, and how it relates to you. An element of this is the Innovate UK’s Global Incubator Programme in Hyderabad. Delivered by Innovate UK Business Growth, it is supporting consecutive cohorts of ten net-zero businesses to better understand and access the Indian market. On the face of it, this may feel a million miles away from you – mentally and physically – but it’s closer than you think.

India is a fascinating place, and one that I’m only recently starting to explore. With a population of 1.4 billion people, the 5th largest economy in the world (and growing), and diverse states and territories with differences akin to those across European states in language, culture, cuisine (and all the rest of it), it is an important place of possibility. As with everywhere else, it has its challenges, that when boiled down to basics, are similar to the challenges we’re facing, albeit manifested differently:

• secure and sustainable energy supplies,
• effective transportation,
• creating jobs and skills,
• resilient supply chains,
• improving air quality,
• managing waste and water flows,
• getting robust community buy-in

The urgency and magnitude of the challenges, however, and the lack of legacy solutions in addressing them, encourages an enormous upwelling of unconstrained innovation.

The companies we take to India have established solutions already, and seek to understand how to tweak and adjust their offerings to successfully enter the Indian market. We take them through a 6-month learning journey, during which they are forced to go back to basics and explore: what their solution is, how it meets real needs, who their customers are, what pricing models will work, effective marketing channels and so on – during which they often discover that what they thought they were going to do in India, is not what they need to do at all. In the process they have their horizons widened, and they learn – from Indian businesses, from one another, and how to make their solution better.

It is this expansion of experience and learning that I’m most interested in, and where this programme ties-back to your work. The only way to succeed in the Indian market is to be able to clearly demonstrate maximum value meeting real needs at the lowest cost; Net Zero means nothing if it isn’t first and foremost solving a more pressing social or economic problem for a place and it’s citizens.

In addition, with an emphasis (and massive market opportunity) in meeting the needs of an enormous lower-income demographic, UK businesses are forced to re-think their business models and re-design supply chains to be cost-competitive. I’m looking to see how both of these pressures flow back to their domestic solutions, and how the experience of doing well in India teaches them to create stronger, more equitable solutions that drive a just transition here in the UK as well.