Tatas Should have sold Nano in the US First:

Interview of Patrick Whitney

US design visionary says Tatas may have lost an opportunity by not positioning Nano as product of choice for middle-income groups in the West before selling it in India

Patrick Whitney, often called a design visionary and known for marrying process design and business strategy, says that the Tatas may have lost an opportunity in Nano by not positioning it as a product of choice for the middle and upper middle class consumers in developed world and then sold it in India. Instead by marketing it directly to the middle- and lower-middle class in India, the product ignored the aspirational ambitions of the class of people it is currently targeting, said Whitney, Dean of the Institute of Design (ID), at Illinois Institute of Technology, the largest graduate school of design in the US. As many as eight of Whitney’s design students from ID is working closely with senior executives at Godrej, through Indian Immersion Programme, a crosslearning initiative where the students will learn business imperatives of design in real world situations while Godrej executives will seek to learn principles of design by observation and abstraction of a user need. In an interview to ET’s Lison Joseph & Satish John, Whitney says that ID is looking to work closely with more Indian corporations as India leads the current wave of design revolution. Excerpts : 

Is it true that India missed the first wave of design innovation but is now leading the second wave? You (India) were late to the first wave and you have a high chance of being a pioneer in the second wave. The challenge is it is a different kind of design now compared to the earlier wave because that type of design is not what the world needs. So, rather than catching up, India can be a co-creator in this new world that we are moving into.

And which sectors do you see this playing out? Any sector that has direct interface with consumers. The first wave was limited to manufacturing and the industrial age. Henry Ford said, ‘give them any color as long as it is black’. And designers didn’t have a humanised approach because in the industrial age it was all about the economies of scale. But now, we have moved into the economy of choice where there is a power shift to the consumers.

In 2003, you quoted a Fortune 25 CEO as saying “we know how to do things, we just don’t know what to do.” Do you see a similar predicament in India? Yes, but it is less evident in India because you are growing and going through the growth phase of a late industrial age economy. So, India and China can get away with a lot in avoiding the new way of doing things. But not forever. And the real problem is there is a train wreck coming. Down the same track on the one way is rise of the poor and the middle class and on the same track coming from the opposite direction is the question of sustainability. India has the chance to grapple with that problem and turn it into an export opportunity. For example, the Nano might have been done in a different way. Rather than positioning it for poor people in India, what if the Tatas had positioned it for the middle class and upper middle class in America? And then sell it to India too. America needs that car too, we are energy hogs. Maybe not the way it is. Europe needs that car as well. There is tremendous opportunity for India and China to show the world how to be sustainable. We’re not going to do it in the US. At least, we don’t seem to be.

You don’t think that Nano met the needs of a certain section of users? Apparently not. Rumor mill tells me that they are re-launching it and repositioning it as a car for the middle class or the upper middle class.

So you are saying it is a lost opportunity for the Tatas to have positioned it the way they did and not in another way? It is easier to say in hindsight. Everybody is smart looking backwards. Poor people like good things too, you know? There used to be a tradeoff between quality and cost in the old age of design, but in the new age of systems and platforms, it is possible to have quality and control cost at the same time.

It’s generally held that most designers don’t understand business, but you are trying to prove otherwise? It is true. Typically, designers have an arts background. In Institute of Design, where I teach, we seek design students who are interested in using business to make the world a better place. We are the first school to create a dual degree programme with design degree and an MBA in the same graduate programme. We believe good design can help businesses serve customers better.

Your institute has a partnership with Godrej? From our point of view, the India Immersion Programme is spectacular in that graduate students are having their lives changed by getting to spend very intense few weeks in India working with managers here who are working on innovation at Godrej. I can’t tell you what they are working on. They are learning a lot and I’m sure they are producing some great ideas.

How would you respond to this general Indian perception that innovation comes at a high cost and hence it is not affordable? You can think of innovation as coming in three ways: Really expensive technological innovation, business model innovation through mergers and acquisitions and human-centered innovation by looking at things from the user’s point of view. The third type does not need to be expensive and it is known to be very good for organic growth. If you pry open an iPhone or iPad, there is almost no new technology in that.