Tata Sons plans to set up an incubator in Pune or Bengaluru and is currently in the process of defining the process and laying out the blueprint for the same. Speaking on the sidelines of Pune Connect, an event organised by the Software Exporters Association of Pune, Gopichand Katragadda, Chief Technology Officer of Tata Sons, said that the basic process would be completed over the next three months. “We would provide visibility to the group companies for these startups. Meanwhile, we are also looking for startups at events like these to see if we can incubate any of them,” he said.

Katragadda, who joined the Tata Group two years ago from GE, had been given a mandate to increase the collaboration across the different group companies. Alongside, the company is also incubating new businesses within the group, the first of which, an ecommerce venture, Cliq was launched recently.

Apart from this, it is currently incubating a venture in the big data analytics and one in the digital health space. The Group Technology and Innovation Office (GTIO), led by him, is already working with startups on these collaborative projects along with other Tata companies. One such is a drone-based precision spraying system for pesticides. “Here, I asked my team to focus on the precision spraying aspect and not on the drone. We are working with a startup, Edall Systems for the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) platform,” he said.

While Rallis contributes to the pesticide spray requirements, Tata Elxsi does the industrial design, TCS provides the CFD simulation and the GTIO, the system architecture and program design. Similarly, the company is testing another product, a wearable which can be used for worker safety in factories, currently being piloted with the crane workers at Tata Steel.

“In the wearables space, we knew we couldn’t compete with an Apple, so we decided to focus on our factories and what our workers need. The device monitors factors like skin temperature, motion and ambient gases and works only in the cabin or wherever you enable it -so it’s not like the workers are being monitored outside of work,” said Katragadda. While Titan worked on the product realisation and manufacturing, the cloud-based data analytics platform came from TCS, the IoT and cloud infrastructure from Tata Communications, and Tata Steel provided the factory safety requirements.

Katragadda said that once the pilot was over, the product would be made available commercially to other group companies to start with, before perhaps moving to companies outside.

Source: Economic Times