For many firms, developing new products for consumers around the world is the most visible manifestation of innovation - the "real deal." But many people still see India as a place where other people's ideas are made or executed and not where innovation begins. (After all, you don't hear about an Indian equivalent to Google, iPod or Viagra.) Bu they're wrong. In more than 600 captive research and development (R&D) centers across India today, corporations are designing and building amazing new things.
For example, GE's John F. Welch Technology Center has developed a string of technological marvels. A transparent roof spanning 300 meters without any central supports. A device to display integrated anatomical information from a CT scan with live functional information from a PET scan.
The markets for these wonder products are truly global, encompassing the United States, Europe, Asia and, of course, India itself.
Similarly, Intel's R&D center in Bengaluru is its largest unit outside the United States.
For example, the center delivered the world's first tera-scale experimental chip capable of one trillion operations per second.
Indian R&D units are present in AstraZeneca, EMC, Microsoft, Philips, Pfizer and Alcatel-Lucent - providing striking evidence that Indians can "do" innovation. But global consumers rarely recognize India as the country of origin because most of this innovation is invisible. How so? The innovation occurring in these Indian captive units is visible only to other business units and is not revealed to end consumers.
Because no country unit is solely responsible for the final result, it's difficult to associate any particular place with the innovation. Thus, the head of the GE unit in Bengaluru took great pains to state clearly that the unit in Bengaluru helped develop everything, but would not take sole credit for the aircraft engines and wind turbines. The global services delivery model was invented in the late 1990s by many Indian IT companies, and this model allows for a key transformation: tightly integrated tasks formerly performed by workers in one location working for a single company now take on a distributed format, such that different parts of the work are executed in different geographies. The advantages are obvious, including the ability to execute work where the best expertise exists at the lowest possible costs, take advantage of time zone differences for round-the-clock efforts, and achieve some level of risk diversification by building redundancy across locations.
Source: Reuters
For example, GE's John F. Welch Technology Center has developed a string of technological marvels. A transparent roof spanning 300 meters without any central supports. A device to display integrated anatomical information from a CT scan with live functional information from a PET scan.
The markets for these wonder products are truly global, encompassing the United States, Europe, Asia and, of course, India itself.
Similarly, Intel's R&D center in Bengaluru is its largest unit outside the United States.
For example, the center delivered the world's first tera-scale experimental chip capable of one trillion operations per second.
Indian R&D units are present in AstraZeneca, EMC, Microsoft, Philips, Pfizer and Alcatel-Lucent - providing striking evidence that Indians can "do" innovation. But global consumers rarely recognize India as the country of origin because most of this innovation is invisible. How so? The innovation occurring in these Indian captive units is visible only to other business units and is not revealed to end consumers.
Because no country unit is solely responsible for the final result, it's difficult to associate any particular place with the innovation. Thus, the head of the GE unit in Bengaluru took great pains to state clearly that the unit in Bengaluru helped develop everything, but would not take sole credit for the aircraft engines and wind turbines. The global services delivery model was invented in the late 1990s by many Indian IT companies, and this model allows for a key transformation: tightly integrated tasks formerly performed by workers in one location working for a single company now take on a distributed format, such that different parts of the work are executed in different geographies. The advantages are obvious, including the ability to execute work where the best expertise exists at the lowest possible costs, take advantage of time zone differences for round-the-clock efforts, and achieve some level of risk diversification by building redundancy across locations.
Source: Reuters
