Innovation: The Sculpting Facet for the Future of Indian Food Sector

Abstract

In this contemporary era, organizations seek innovation for its competitive advantage, growth and survival. Every organization, in particular, the food industries are continuously upgrading their technologies, product design, packaging, supply chain, and retail management to sustain and increase their market share while at the same drawing customers to their products and services invariably. The present paper primarily highlights the various aspects of innovation and how it gets shaped with different organizational variables and prevailing global trends in relevance to the Food Sector. As innovation is multi-dimensional, every organization has to ensure the adaptation of its various aspects in particular to the types of innovation that represent the need of food sector ranging from open and close innovations, incremental to radical innovations and various process, product, positional, technical and administrative innovations. The paper also sheds light on new facets that describes the adoption and implementation of innovation from the lens view of innovation with respect to sustainability, corporate culture and performance. The food companies in other parts of the world are adopting innovation by focusing on its different sources both national and trans-national, flexible business models and, exploring new types of innovation presumably architectural and disruptive thereby improving organizational culture towards a more sustainable working. Whereas, the Indian food industry is acclimating innovation in niche food service sectors such as fusion foods, healthy foods, and ethnic foods in order to target various customer segments and ultimately increase their consumer base. This paper also makes a comparison of current innovation status in the food industry both with a global and Indian perspective by focusing on R&D expenditure, patent registration, policy implications and the advent of startup culture within the food sector. It also gives a brief insight into various centers that incubate entrepreneurship activities within the Indian scenario. Innovation in food processing industries paves the way for product and process development which is indeed a higher priority for these industries both for a smart business strategy and to capture the targeted market. The government of India must take policy initiatives for the transformation of the unorganized sector to organized sector so as to meet its challenges, and further, within the organized sector, innovation could be a key to facilitate entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship maneuver which quintessentially will lead to empowering people and economic growth as a whole.