Abstract

Navroze Godrej (Navroze), the young executive director for Strategy and Innovation at Godrej and Boyce, the holding company of the India-based Godrej Group, is a fourth generation scion of the Godrej family. Keen on bringing about a major change in his company’s design thinking, he set himself the goal of changing the Godrej Group’s old-world, engineering driven mindset into a forward looking design driven mindset. He aimed to shape the Godrej Group into a company that inculcated a culture of open collaboration between different work groups and businesses. As part of his efforts to fulfill this aim, he created a suitable ambience and office infrastructure to break down the organizational hierarchies. He also started the Godrej Design Lab to encourage young designers to showcase their work. The selected designers were mentored and their designs displayed at national level exhibitions. The case discusses whether the initiatives taken by Navroze to bring about organizational transformation to make the Godrej Group design, innovation, and consumer focused can succeed. The case gives enough scope to analyze whether the influx of young talent is capable of bringing in novel ideas to shape the company’s future.

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• Identify the design orientation of an organization
• Understand the process of strategic design thinking
• Examine how disruptive thinking can shape a company’s future
• Develop a methodology for crowd-sourcing innovative ideas

Keywords

Design-thinking, Organizational hierarchies, Organizational culture, Disruptive business model, Pilot project, Disruptive innovation, Security solutions, Transient consumers, Ethnographic research, Urban consumers, Holding company, Younger talent, Buyback scheme, Co-create, Crowd-sourcing