Mahesh believes innovation involves pushing past existing boundaries. It means continually exploring the market's future needs, understanding the industry's technology advances and avoiding merely re-inventing the wheel.

Mahesh cautions that because innovating in the semiconductor industry is becoming increasingly capital- and resource-intensive, it involves more than coming up with an idea. Valuable innovations also require working through the details to ensure the ideas are translated into product features that help customers differentiate their products and expand their business.

Since joining TI in 1986, Mahesh has led the development of several industry-leading digital and system-on-a-chip designs, including the first commercial digital signal processor (DSP) designed in India. Today he leads embedded processing projects in TI's Kilby Labs, India.

And he thinks that due to the complexity of the semiconductor industry, it's now impossible for a lone individual to bring an idea to fruition.

Working on a next-generation video-compression engine, for example, requires close collaboration of experts across applications as well as between software and hardware domains, he says. He believes the speed and quality of innovation can be significantly improved by sharing ideas, leveraging individuals' multidisciplinary expertise and building on one another's ideas.