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Infosys and the global delivery model
An Indian IT services company pioneered a delivery model that split work across time zones and cost centres, becoming a template the wider Indian IT industry adopted.
In the early years of the Indian IT services industry, most software work for international clients required consultants to travel and work on-site at the client's location, which was expensive and difficult to scale.
This company developed and refined what became known as the global delivery model — splitting project work between smaller onsite teams (client-facing, requirements-gathering) and larger offshore teams in India (development, testing) connected through disciplined processes and communication protocols.
This structural innovation let the company offer international clients significant cost advantages while maintaining quality, by doing most of the labour-intensive work in a lower-cost location without sacrificing coordination with the client.
The model became the template the broader Indian IT services industry adopted and refined, contributing significantly to India's emergence as a major global hub for IT services and business process outsourcing.
the lesson
A structural innovation in how work is organised and delivered — not just what is delivered — can become a durable competitive advantage and, eventually, an entire industry's template.