From Making Soaps To Becoming Tata’s CTO, This Man Has Definitely Come A Long Way!

May 14, 2015
Gopichand Katragadda started off with making soaps. Yeah, you heard that right. Not an editing mistake. He learnt to make soap from his English teacher, and then sold the soap to neighbours and friends. He enjoyed the act of creating and he sold it because it was a validation that what he created had value.

 

Making things of value, not of just an inherent kind but with a market value, is something Katragadda likes. That is what drove him as the Chief of R&D while at GE, Bangalore. He headed the global conglomerate’s largest R&D centre outside the US, employing 5,500 engineers and scientists. The centre produced 300 patents a year and, among other things, he spearheaded the development of low wind speed turbines that generates over $250 million revenue in India and $1 billion globally.

 

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He has since moved to the Tata Group, in the capacity of a Chief Technology Officer, because Chairman Cyrus Mistry said they want to be “one of the top 10 technologically innovative companies globally”. 

 

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It’s a wonder how this man manages to do so much, while we struggle to do whatever little we can with our time.  

 

He has directed a Telugu film on treasure hunters, is the author of a well-acclaimed book called S.M.A.S.H Innovation, paints extensively, is a regular blogger on subjects as varied as carbon steel’s India connection, how to prevent flooding of lakes and health care for the masses. While doing his MS and PhD at the Iowa State University in the US, he created time for himself to be a radio jockey and represent Indian students. Where does he get the goddamn time??

 

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“India needs to break into the next waves of innovation and create wealth not just for a few years, or for a single company, but for hundreds of years and for the whole nation. There is a quantum leap required in terms of our thinking,” he says. We can’t help but agree!

 

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His role at Tata would be to identify the opportunities that are not yet tapped; in areas such as Energy security, under which work will be done on better use of coal and better usage of waste by the group’s power and steel plants. And then new forms of renewable energy and food security, which will look at sustaining the need of people in the future with the help of precision agriculture. The other areas are consumer electronics, and factory and fleet digitisation to reduce the cost and carbon dioxide footprint and increase yield.

 

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PS: We’re yet to come to terms with the fact that this man has 48 hrs in a day.

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