Tata Sons’ Group Technology and Innovation Office (GTIO) aims to rollout the first of the four high-tech products it is working on in the next two years, says Group Technology Officer Dr. Gopichand Katragadda.
He said GTIO is working on four specific products — a smartwatch for industrial workers being tested on Tata Steel’s workforce, a drone-based pesticide spraying system, a factory and fleet analytics system, and an allotrope of carbon called graphene, which he said will take longer (about five years) , reports Silicon India News.
The Tata Group is India’s biggest spender on research and development, and last year, it spent 2.7 per cent of its $110 billion revenue on R&D and innovation.
“When you are doing business incubation, the tech risk has been retired. We are in an area where the tech risk is not retired. GTIO is in the business of identifying those risks which are worth taking and retiring the technical risks.
“Once the technical risks are retired, we will try to find an avenue to incubate the business. The fun part of it is that you get to work with latest technologies in an environment where there is a lot of creative freedom,” Katragadda added.