Mozilla Open Innovation Project

Beyond the digital divide and the enablers of such division there exists further stratification in tech based organisations in the country. As highlighted in the previous sections, funding plays a large role in the creation of tech organisations and their products. Often leading to the mushrooming of organisations that propose solutions mimicking or aiding a well funded tech company.

Hence the role of smaller players and semi-digitised organisations that use both technology and other resources to develop tools for final stakeholders are essential to the current ecosystem. Through the work done by these enterprises local innovation shifts from a product oriented mindset to a stakeholder driven mindset. In doing so semi-digitised enterprises provide context specific solutions for their clients. Respondents from such organisations often use other models of funding which are revenue based, though some organisations did have some VC funding but it wasn’t consistently observed in such groups.

Context Specific Solutions

Like in the sections above, larger players perpetuate the hierarchy already in place. Like with the ASHA workers experience, other sector stakeholders such as farmers in agriculture are given a lack of context while providing technology solutions. Thus organisations that are tech focussed but exist as relatively smaller players or are semi-digitised are crucial to the development of tech enabled solutions for different communities. A respondent from an agritech company highlighted the requirement of in-depth data collection to produce a relevant technology enabled service to their stakeholders,

Yeah, so, so the, I think the biggest problem is that farmers, especially smallholder farmers, don’t get solutions that are contextually relevant to them. What they get is more of a prescriptive solution. So I am sitting here, I have some understanding that there will be this thing, you should do this thing, right? And how do we create a contextually relevant, you know, solution for them. And for that, what we need is the information about the farmer, which includes about the farm, about the farming activity, about the community, and so on and so forth.

• Participant_18_Agriculture

From our responses we noticed that smaller organisations use partnerships, using client focussed and existing eco-systems to produce contextually specific solutions. Some organisations used existing government schemes and local government bodies to hire participants to collect their data or use their technology services respectively. In doing so problems of digital divide were reduced for the final stakeholder.

Fieldwork and Experience:

Along with this we observed that fieldwork and client interaction was also an important tool for the building of technology solutions for different enterprises, often with different sources of funding rather than solely VC funded enterprises. As one participant working in the CiviTech space focussing on the rural parts of India explained,

So one of our projects managers visits the field location to gather the details of different operations. Based on that we understood their expectation, what do they want to digitise, what are the problem statements they’re having. And then we prepared a proposal with the approach note and the solution, which we submitted to them with costing, which ended up in negotiation. And after that, once it was approved, we were on boarded as a tech partner for them, then a project manager was assigned to the project. He or she came from a background where they could understand the field scenarios, and articulated into a tech specification for the software team. And then they took around two weeks time to articulate those things after field visits.

• Participant_25_Civitech

Thus through continuous engagements with the client, fieldwork with the final stakeholders and the on ground realities of collecting such data the organisation was able to create a context specific technology enabled solution. In doing so, we see that larger organisations (not necessarily digitised) were also able to outsource specific tasks to smaller players for a more nuanced tech enabled solution.

Other organisations use their own experiences to create technology products and services to provide contextually sound solutions. Some respondents after years of working in the field were unable to find technology solutions for their specific needs and thus took matters into their own hands. In one such instance an organisation was unhappy with the available tools for the creation of workflow mapping for their organisation. Hence, they built their own proprietary tool which they now distribute to other organisations who require similar solutions. The respondent explained,

So for example, the simplest thing, being able to define your own workflows, right? Typically, a lot of products are set up as forms. And you can adapt the forms, but you can’t do workflows. So what a [Product Z] does, when [Person A] interacts for the first time with a household versus the second time versus the third time versus the tenth time? Right? They’re supposed to, they’re actually different, right? Because she’s building on a relationship. Right, who defines that? Now, who defines that in my programme, I define it. And the way I define it may not be acceptable to somebody in the next organisation, because the way they do it is different, right? But is there a way that you can make it a solution that allows me to do it within my own organisation without having to go back to the developer to actually customise that.

• Participant_24_Health

From these experiences we see that smaller players in the ecosystem provide an integral role to the local innovation of technology enabled solutions and services in the country. However, calling them small might be considered inaccurate as some organisations have also grown through these methods to enable further work in other countries outside of India. Nevertheless, their work continues to focus on the final stakeholder instead of producing an overarching solution to be implemented by all.