Krishna Kumar G, MD, Harman India, and senior vice president, automotive R&D country lead
Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India
More than 12 years ago, a project named Saras at what was then Harman International became the subject of a report on ‘reverse innovation’ in the ‘Globe’ section of the Harvard Business Review.
Saras was the brainchild of its then CEO Dinesh Paliwal, and led by his chief software architect promoted to CTO Sachin Lawande.
Despite both internal opposition and suspicion from various quarters and initial customer scepticism, Saras delivered a novel product architecture and an easily configurable modular product that led to $3 billion in new business just 18 months after its launch.
Saras had a modest team software team in India, a few hardware engineers in China and a handful from Germany and the US. Fast forward to today, and Harman, now a part of Samsung Electronics, has some 4,000 automotive electronics specialists delivering hi-tech innovation.
“One of the reasons we stand out as a GCC (global capability centre) is that we have end-to-end capabilities here,” Krishna Kumar Gopalakrishnan, managing director Harman India and senior VP, and automotive R&D country lead, tells Forbes India. “From ideation to product management, requirements management, system definition, architecture design and so on, you name it, we have relevant, highly qualified and skilled people in India.”
Not only does Harman serve some of the world’s biggest car makers—Toyota accepting Saras back then helped the product take off—but also India’s top car makers Tata Motors and Mahindra. “Take a Tata car for example, and what used to be seen in a Mercedes or a BMW is now available in a sub-`25-lakh rupee car. And this is only going to intensify,” Kumar says.
Harman’s automotive teams in India are deeply involved in global projects, collaborating with other sites around the world, he says. For example, the India team conceived the need for an entry/mid segment IVI (in-vehicle infotainment) platforms, which were used to launch multiple OEM cars across the globe.
They developed Harman Automotive’s first Android-based IVI/Cockpit platforms. And they contributed to both hardware and software development of a product called ‘READY CONNECT’, helping OEM customers get their cars to the market faster. They also developed an audio framework and acoustic tuning tool for Harman’s AudioworX software, recognised for the in-cabin audio experience it provides.
With Samsung in the mix, and the smartphone giant’s backing, “our motto is, ‘consumer experiences. Automotive grade’,” Kumar says. And that the company has a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Pune adds to their value proposition.
Also read: India: From IT to GCC hub
In the coming years, there is immense opportunity as India is under-penetrated in terms of the car ownership, Kumar says, while one must recognise challenges ranging from poor roads to bad driver behaviour.
Even as Chinese car makers churn out new cars and features faster than ever, Indian car makers will move to keep pace. “I’m very sure that India will become the focal point for innovation in cars in the coming five years,” he says.
This also means Harman Automotive’s India teams will only play a bigger role in the company’s future. And as part of embracing that future, there’s also a cultural transformation underway, Kumar says. “This involves transformation across the board, from the way we interact with customers to the way we do development or the way we deploy software.”
The company is working on a multi-pronged strategy for transformation, which is currently in its third year, and goes well beyond the usual suspects like reskilling. Change is also coming to how the company reacts to market circumstances, collaboration, and how an innovation can be sustained over a long period. There are also key people in India who are able to influence the outcomes in other Harman sites, he says.
Cultural changes are happening too in areas such as communication between individuals all the way to across the company. There is also an effort to provide people what is now catching on as “psychological safety” so that they can openly disclose problems and then still don’t need to worry about repercussions.
He also lays emphasis on what he calls the “say-do ratio”, which is his way of describing the need for leaders who walk the talk.
“It’s a journey,” he says.
(This story appears in the 21 February, 2025 issue
of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
