Innovation, the engine that led to the birth of NIIT Ltd., is also an intrinsic part of the organisational DNA of NIIT Technologies. Since inception, the software business has taken the unbeaten path, launching initiatives that have often been industry firsts. The arrival of packaged software in India, is in large part a result of NIIT’s distributorship agreements with global majors.

In more recent times, Innovation at NIIT Technologies has found reflection in the Technology Innovation Centre (TIC) - the applied research arm of the company. As the name suggests, TIC is engaged in identifying innovation opportunities arising out of a dynamic technology landscape and driven by changing customer needs. In addition, the centre also nurtures innovative ideas in usage of technology originating anywhere in the organisation. It has a small, but dedicated and technologically motivated team that conceptualises and creates new tools, frameworks and solutions accelerators that can be deployed in customer engagements to reduce cycle time and deliver better functionality.

TIC has an open culture, where research is shared with the rest of the organisation, customers and the software development community. This sharing takes the form of contributions to the open source movement, where TIC has provided several tools and frameworks. Sharing also happens at international conferences, where NIIT Technologies showcases its innovative work, especially in emerging technologies areas such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 and technologies for mobile platform. TIC is actively engaged in exploring these technologies, jointly working with customers in applying them and learning from that experience. Several reusable frameworks have been derived from these experiences and have been released as open source.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/enriche/
http://rubyforge.org/projects/richruby/

At the same time, TIC has also been undertaking research in the field of code comprehension, visualisation and transformation. The result has been Insight, a Generic Code Comprehension and Transformation Tool, which can be customised for any language and used for code transformation.

In the last few years, TIC has also been evolving its Model Driven Software Engineering and Software Factory approaches to meet customer demand for enhanced software development. TIC has been building tools based on Domain Specific Language (DSL) and Domain Specific Modelling (DSM) that have associated generators for modelling transaction-based commercial applications. The latest version of the tool is available as open source. http://sourceforge.net/projects/buildmyapplicat/

Knowledge Management is another key area that the TIC has been actively addressing, with solutions that help customers manage their knowledge resources. NIIT Technologies has created its own Knowledge Management tool, which has been enabling all its users organise customer-specific knowledge.

Driven by the proliferation and success of social networking sites, the TIC has been working in the area of Collective Intelligence (CI), harnessing the phenomenon to better manage organisational knowledge. It has been experimenting with different knowledge management and collaboration technologies like wikis and forums to harness information sharing and knowledge dissemination.