Introduction

Enterprises in the throes of discovery have an aura of magic around them. In the world of software this becomes many-splendoured with a certain joie de vivre that it generates, quite distinct from what obtains elsewhere: a sense of wonderment, surprise and eventual delight; a coming within reach of power and profits; possibly through a little tweak in technology with a touch of novelty, opening up vistas that have always seemed so near and yet so far. In professional management terms, this waving of the wizard’s wand, as it were, is nothing more than an effective recovery of strategy from a technological paradigm. This book is about exploring the journey from rules and norms to solutions, specific solutions prized out of the armoured covers of sector-specific industrial structures and often resources-determined mindsets. Originality is the fountainhead for such strategy. It then progresses into the realms of the economics of innovation to give itself a solid foundation from where it becomes possible to retrieve a new language of strategy and of innovation. In this highly natural yet dynamic world, the profit motive, backed by ingenuity, lends support to many of the arguments that evolve in this flow of events. The Indian software experience is a unique demonstration of how this process — the coalescing of the economics of surprise and novelty and the economics of knowledge — works. This forms the basics of the strategy theory.