While I was thinking about how we at 24/7 Customer are helping our customers to serve their end consumers using the N=1, R=G model, I started looking at how we are using it for our own business. Being a global company gives us a lot of opportunity to leverage both those formulae internally, and there are several areas where they have been applied. A couple that stood out for me are in the areas of product innovation and process improvement.

One of our business divisions -- 24/7 Innovation Labs -- focuses on creating next-generation solutions using complex mathematical modeling across the end customer lifecycle. The group has created patent-pending predictive models that enable real-time prediction of customer behavior.

During the lab's infancy, the key for us was to create a specific solution for one of our clients, and we used the R=G model. We reached out to intellectual resources in specific areas of technology and statistical modeling in different parts of the globe, both internally and externally, ranging from employees in the United States to academicians in Netherlands and the U.S., to research scholars in premier engineering colleges in India, to research heads in a couple of diverse industry verticals and designers in eastern Europe. In short, we were using R=G to create an open innovation platform to serve one of our customers. The result laid the seeds of real-time predictive modeling in our product development roadmap that eventually ended up in creating intellectual property.

On the process improvement side, I am a big believer in soliciting the best ideas for continuously improving efficiencies in our business. We identify areas of improvement in a specific location and throw it open to the employees of the company (N=1) to contribute through a suggestion scheme called INSPIRE.

Employees from different parts of our business, and different locations, come up with suggestions to problems and the best ideas get rewarded. So there have been instances where someone sitting in Guatemala or California contributes solutions to a problem in Hyderabad that will be eventually implemented with the help of a cross-functional team that is distributed across California, Bangalore, and Hyderabad!

Over 1,200 such suggestions across 30 functional areas have been accepted and implemented in the last two years.

That is the power of N=1, R=G.

P V Kannan is the CEO and co-founder of 24/7 Customer ( www.247customer.com).