Azim Premji on R&D and Innovation

Speaking at Stanford GSB's View From The Top series on 27 October 2006, Premji told students that failure is essential to innovation: you cannot generate a few good ideas without a lot of bad ones, and failures should be forgiven and forgotten quickly. The framing made risk-tolerance a structural requirement, not just a corporate slogan.

In his argument, every market at every juncture has significant scale advantages that make incumbents look invincible, yet upstart technologies repeatedly disrupt them and rewrite the rules. He cited Skype, which became the first to offer voice-over-Internet phone services at broad scale, long after established telecom companies had begun talking about the technology — a reminder that incumbents often describe change before they execute it.

By the time of his Stanford talk, Wipro was the world's largest independent R&D services provider — a positioning that put it a step beyond pure coding into contracted research for Western high-tech and consumer-product companies, leveraging Indian engineering talent at a lower cost than their in-house labs.

Premji distinguished creativity from innovation in his Stanford talk: creativity is about making new things, while innovation is about doing new things. The distinction mattered to him because it placed execution, not invention, at the centre of business value — a stance that explains Wipro's services-first DNA.

He emphasised that companies must deliberately design a culture of innovation: actively seek customer feedback, celebrate diversity in the workforce, and create an environment in which workers feel safe taking risks even when they fail. Innovation, in his view, is engineered through culture rather than left to chance.

Premji told the Stanford audience that real progress comes as much from changing behaviour as from inventing new products. The line reflected a management philosophy that prizes adoption and execution over invention and IP — an appropriate stance for a services-led firm whose customers' needs set the agenda.