Demystifying India Through Service Design Turning complexities into opportunities India is often described as ‘complex’ due to its diverse cultural, economic and social structures that make it challenging for companies to penetrate or innovate. We sought to better understand this complexity and define how service designers can turn these complexities into opportunities. Nikhita Ghugari is Co-founder and Creative Strategist at Xeno Co-lab, a service design consultancy based in Pune, India. She studied product design and has been practising Design Thinking and trend forecasting for the past six years. Her work has been focussed on helping businesses design products and services based on their users’ needs and future thinking that are relevant and future-proof. nikhita@xenocolab.com
Swar Raisinghani is Cofounder and Design Lead at Xeno Co-lab. She holds a degree in social innovation and her passion lies in helping businesses practise human- centred design to create meaningful and innovative products and services across sectors such as finance, healthcare, digital services, etc. swar@xenocolab.com
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Decoding a complex landscape Many factors in India continue to draw the attention and investment of companies from abroad. Its strong GDP growth, youthful demographics1 and thriving global startup culture have led to an influx of new products and services aimed at the Indian consumer. As India and its people rapidly evolve, companies view the country as both a huge playground of untapped opportunities and a mysterious, complicated puzzle to solve. Recently at the Innovation Social Global conference, a CEO asked our team: “Tell me how companies become successful in India. What’s the secret?” This question, although broad, was direct and valid. We had no single answer.
1 By 2020, it will be the world’s youngest country with an average age of 29. Source: Financial Express, 2017: https://www.financialexpress. com/india-news/with-an-average-age-of-29india-will-be-the-worlds-youngest-countryby-2020/603435/.
In addition to the country’s demographic, economic and cultural diversity, there is also unequal access to products and services and inconsistent infrastructural support. Because of such challenges, companies have a hard time figuring out how to introduce differentiated products and services that create and sustain loyalty from the Indian audience. Despite these challenges, global companies such as Google, Uber and IKEA have made inroads into the market. They have done so through the introduction of differentiated, valueadded products and services or by shifts in their business models. For instance, Google introduced YouTubeGo after studying the infrastructural limitations of wi-fi and mobile network coverage. Unique features, such as watching videos offline and providing a preview of videos, let the user decide how they want to use their mobile data. Such features address user needs in a way that is relevant to contextual constraints.
