A case study on TATA

SWACH.
PREPARED BY,
SHREYA NAIR (157780592104)
SHIVANI JHALA (157780592102)
KISHNA PATEL (157780592074)
NITA RABARI (157780592080)
JYOTSANA PARMAR (157780592068)
PALAK AGRAWAL (157780592003)
SEM II ,SLIBMS

1. Discuss any other product innovation that has helped to

tackle the need of rural India.
Innovative stove is a double chambered efficient portable stove, used
primarily for community cooking.

This portable stove is made of bricks, cement, clay, cast iron and can
cook food upto 100 kg. The base of the bottom chamber is made of
iron grill on which the fuel is kept. Below the grill is an air chamber.
When the fuel burns, smoke mixed with unburnt hydrocarbons
reaches the upper chamber, which has been provided with air inlet
holes. Complete combustion takes place here and the combined heat
gets available to the cooking vessel above the second chamber. The
fuel opening has been provided at the front of the device and can be
regulated using shutter, which in turn controls the flow of air. The air
which flows through the opening during combustion causes an updraft
when the fuel is burnt. This triggers secondary combustion as the
carbon particles, which were left unburned will now get burned due to
the additional air.

Apart from its efficiency, lower cost and portability are also
significant features of this stove. The combustion efficiency is in the
range of 37.67% when wood is used as a fuel and 29.48% when
coconut shell is used (Test report by Integrated Rural Technology
Centre, Mandur, Palakkad). IIT Guwahati also tested the same and
observed the thermal efficiency of 29.28%. ANERT team has

informed that Hotel IN Calicut, using this stove, needs only 75

coconut shells costing about Rs. 30 for cooking 40 kg rice. This is in
contrast to LPG operated system, which needs 10 kg fuel costing
about Rs. 400 for cooking the rice of same quantity. Considering the
efficiency, cost effectiveness, portability and unique design, NIF
applied patent (1582/CHE/2011) for portable wooden stove in
innovators name.

Q2 Tata Swach requires aggressive marketing in rural India.

What are the barriers and enablers to this effort?
Enablers for successive marketing of Tata Swach:
Combination of unique features that have been built into it.
Tata Swach requires neither running water nor electricity nor
boiling, making it an attractive buy for Indian households that
lack these requirements.
Affordable price(Tata Swach Smart at `749 and the Tata Swach
Smart Magic at `499)
Its looks and simplicity of use.
Requires very little maintenance.
Further enabler came in the form of a slew of awards, including
the prestigious Asian Innovation Award 2010 awarded by the
Wall Street Journal; the Sniff award for new product innovation
given by LeapVault Bloomberg; the Design of the Decade
Award 2010 Gold and the Pitch Best Marketing Award
Bottom of Pyramid 2010. Swach also won the ICIS Overall
Winner 2010 and Product Innovation Awards and was declared
the Gold Winner of AIMA Global Innovation Award for Case
Studies 2010.These awards motivated the team and also created
awareness about Swach.
Problems that Swach solves are omnipresent. Problems like
brackish water, turbid water and arsenic.
Barriers
Lack of awareness of clean drinking water.
Adoptibility.
Fear of being perceived as an inferior product due to low
price.
Difficulty in transportation.

Q3. Search Internet for few technology diffusion frameworks.

Can these frameworks be used to improve the acceptability of this
product?
Frameworks for technology diffusion
Peres, Muller and Mahajan suggested that diffusion is "the process of
the market penetration of new products and services that is driven by
social inuence, which include all interdependencies among
consumers that affect various market players with or without their
explicit knowledge".
Eveland evaluated diffusion from a phenomenological view, stating,
"Technology is information, and exists only to the degree that people
can put it into practice and use it to achieve values"
Diffusion of existing technologies has been measured using "S
curves". These technologies include radio, television, VCR, cable,
flush toilet, clothes washer, refrigerator, home ownership, air
conditioning, dishwasher, electrified households, telephone, cordless
phone, cellular phone, per capita airline miles, personal computer and
the Internet. These data can act as a predictor for future innovations.
Rogers defines an adopter category as a classification of
individuals within a social system on the basis of innovativeness.
Rogers suggests a total of five categories of adopters in order to
standardize the usage of adopter categories in diffusion research. The
adoption of an innovation follows an S curve when plotted over a
length of time. The categories of adopters are: innovators, early
adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. In addition to the
gatekeepers and opinion leaders who exist within a given community,
change agents may come from outside the community. Change agents
bring innovations to new communities rst through the gatekeepers,
then through the opinion leaders, and so on through the community.

Rate of adoption
The rate of adoption is defined as the relative speed at which
participants adopt an innovation. Rate is usually measured by the
length of time required for a certain percentage of the members of a
social system to adopt an innovation.[38] The rates of adoption for
innovations are determined by an individuals adopter category. In
general, individuals who first adopt an innovation require a shorter
adoption period (adoption process) when compared to late adopters.
Within the adoption curve at some point the innovation
reaches critical mass. This is when the number of individual adopters
ensures that the innovation is self-sustaining.

Yes these framework can be used to increase the acceptability of the

product Tata Swach by :
Acceptance strategies
Rogers outlines several strategies in order to help an innovation reach
this stage, including when an innovation adopted by a highly
respected individual within a social network and creating an
instinctive desire for a specific innovation. Another strategy includes
injecting an innovation into a group of individuals who would readily

use said technology, as well as providing positive reactions and

benefits for early adopters.

The role of social systems

Opinion leaders
Not all individuals exert an equal amount of influence over others. In
this sense opinion leaders are influential in spreading either positive
or negative information about an innovation. Opinion leaders have the
most influence during the evaluation stage of the innovation-decision
process and on late adopters. In addition opinion leaders typically
have greater exposure to the mass media, greater contact with change
agents, more social experience and exposure,and are more innovative
than others. They can influence the rural population to take up this
product and give them information about the benefits of the product.
Communication channels
Using the right communication channels the Tata swach purifier can
be communicated to villagers and can increase their acceptance by
making them aware of the product and its features. Once one
previously homophilous tie adopts the behaviour or innovation, the
other members of that group are more likely to adopt it, too.

Q4 What if any could be reason for failure of such type of innovation? Discuss

I do not find any probable reason for failure of this innovative

technique because generally the factors of failure of any
innovative technique arise from
1) Factors attributable to human errors- for this new technique
in question this factor does not arise at all because once
installed the machine works on its own without any human
involvement.
2) Factors attributable to energy/power/source failure this new
technique does not require any power such as

electricity/chemicals etc or sources like running water etc.

Hence it is infallible from this angle too.
3) Cost/affordability factors any innovation, be it very
efficient and effective, is likely to fail unless it is cost
effective simply because most of the general public wont be
much inclined experiment with a costly innovation. However
for this subject innovation cost is meager and affordable to
the most common man.
Hence they have put into their all out sincere efforts to make
this innovation failure proof.
However, as critics may find, anything manmade has its own
aging and expiry which can be true for this also.
Another factor, of course with most remote possibility is the
failure due to mishandling