This collection made ripples in international markets. The watch boasts of housing a 1.15mm thin movement in a case that is no thicker than 3.5mm. These watches are also 30m water resistant. The styling and design are contemporary, and the collection was the winner of the 2003- Business World - NID Design Excellence Award - Best Lifestyle Product.
Comment by Michael Foley - Designer for Titan EDGE
"The most delightful part of the whole experience was being able to extract as much out of the design to make it absolutely timeless and minimalistic. ‘Detail that echoes purity’ was the overriding principle. I also really liked the collaborative spirit and openness at Titan, which led to the manifestation of Edge."
How 11 Indians pulled off the impossible :
Making breakthrough Innovation Happen
Author - Porus Munshi
Ratan Tata's view about this book :
"This book... distinguishes itself by its detailed focus on the thought processes which inspired the breakthroughs. This innovative approach in storytelling enhances the book's inspiration quotient for the reader and challenges her or him to set out on a similar journey."
Excerpts from the book :
Gandhi's biggest concern was not expelling the British. That could be done. But if it was done without an enslaved people first feeling and seeing themselves as equal to any ruler, one set of rulers would only be replace by another, and inequality with its inherent exploitation and arrogance would continue. The challenge for him was to get the people of India to move from a state of defence to positive irreverence. In a sense, Gandhi's challenge is as relevant today.
That is the mindset that Titan Watch Industries' then Managing Director Xerxes Desai faced, when in 1994, he set his team an orbit shifting challenge : "Create the slimmest water-resistant watch in the world!"
This meant that the watch would need to be a maximum of 3.5mm thick - as thick as the edge of a floppy disk - and water-resistant to boot. When they went to the masters of watch making, the Swiss, to look for help and insights, the Swiss said it was impossible. It couldn't be done. A watch could either be ultra-slim or water-resistant. It couldn't be both.
The Titan team, however, took on the challenge and said that if the Swiss couldn't do it, they would, and they did.
It took them four years, but they did the impossible and they did it through radical feats of engineering that challenged almost every parameter of watch making. The slimmest water-resistant watch in the world was conceptualised, designed, developed and manufactured not in Switzerland or Japan, but right here in India by a company just a little over a decade old then. The ëdge"as it was called, was production ready by 1998 and was finally launched in the market in 2000. In a very quiet, low-key manner, an Indian company had created an engineering breakthrough and nailed history to its doorstep.
Today, the Edge is a success story for Titan and is sold globally as the world's slimmest water-resistant watch. The single brand contributes to around 6 percent of Titan Watches turnover. But more than the revenue impact, the true impact of the Edge is that it gave Titan the confidence that it could make truly global innovative products.
The Challenges :
Developing the Edge wasn't easy since engineering was a huge challenge. But the greater challenges were internal. As B.V Nagaraj, then head of Product Engineering put it, the top challenge was to instil in people the self belief that they could do it. In something truly radical, the greatest challenge always lies in creating self-belief in the team. At Titan, the first reaction of many in the organisation was "if the Swiss can't do it, how can we?" That is perhaps the biggest illogical conclusion you may have heard, if somebody else hasn't done it, it always means that no one is ever going to do it. And if somebody does it, it won't be us. It'll be some other team somewhere else.
It was this mindset of deference to the developed world that key players - Dwarkanath, then Chief Technology Officer, Subramanya Bhatt, then Head of Movement R&D, B.V Nagaraj and of course Xerxes Desai - had to tackle and it proved to be their greatest challenge when it came to energising the team.
Finally, after four years of hard work and breaking boundaries, the watch was ready. The prototypes were sent to Chronofiable SA, Switzerland, a world-renowned independent Horological Testing Agency. There, the watches were subjected to a series of stringent tests like high and low temperature tests, exposure to vibrations, shock tests, drop tests etc all spread over a span of eight weeks. After these tests, Titan Edge was certified as not just reliable, but also water-resistant upto thirty meters.
They were also tested at Titan internally, and what's interesting is the way Dwarkanath tested it. He said "Sure the agencies test thoroughly, but somehow they can never replicate actual life conditions." So he threw the Edge against a wall, and onto the floor at different angles to check if it stays safe. He chucked it into a swimming pool and it was expected to work. Finally, he tied it to the shock absorbers of his car and made several trips on the terrible roads between Bangalore and Hosur, covering 200km in all. The Edge passed these tests too.
The team had done the impossible. They had created the world's slimmest water-resistant watch. A team that believed it didn't have the competency suddenly discovered talents they had no idea they had!
Thank you Seenivasan K (Movement Manufacturing) for using OCR on the book and sharing this article!
About the author :
Porus Munshi is an Associate at Erehwon Innovation Consulting, a company dedicated to fuelling innovation in India. He is a postgraduate in psychology and was the author of a widely read column for the Hindu Businessline titled ‘Work and You’. Human performance, impossible dreams and causes, and taking on challenges fascinate him. In his work with clients across industries, Munshi is known as someone who releases and unblocks the innate potential of people, so that they begin to conceptualize, innovate and achieve what they previously believed to be impossible. He triggers and facilitates innovation missions and works with top leadership teams, helping them make mindset shifts.