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A peek into the Indian R&D landscape
ST Team
Monday, March 31, 2008
Some of the best brains of the Indian IT industry thronged the Leela Palace, Bangalore, in large numbers on March 14 as the ‘Offshoring R&D-2008’ event gave them a platform to discuss the status of the Indian R&D sector. The opportunities in India for R&D activities and understanding the opportunities for innovation in the Indian market were the key topics discussed in the two day event organized by Zinnov, a management consultancy company, with a focus on the research and development landscape in India.

Naresh Chand Gupta, Senior Vice president, Print and Publishing Business Unit and MD, Adobe systems said that to retain best talent in the organization we need to give up the ownership of the products to the engineers who are working on them. Intrapreneurship is the key tool to support, eulogize, and reward the talent.

Today, Indian R&D sector is facing vital challenges like attrition and low employee productivity. “Currently the attrition rate at R&D centers in India is 8 to 20 percent, which is becoming more and more tough to cope up with. Besides, employee productivity in India is 30 to 40 percent low due to the low experience levels and lack of domain expertise,” says Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov.

“Being innovative is not a nationalistic character. There should not be any predisposition like Indian engineers, Israeli engineers, and so on,” stated Dave Ettle, Senior VP, Products and Technology, AMDOCS OSS Division while discussing about innovation.
Ways to imbibe a culture of innovation in the organization, strategies to achieve optimization, and the fact that India is fast losing the cost advantages as a low cost destination for managing offshore centers were the prominent topics of discussion.

Dr. Bobby Mitra, Managing Director, Texas Instruments India, Sharad Sharma, CEO, Yahoo! India R&D, and Naresh Chand Gupta were conferred with the Zinnov R&D leadership awards. A strategic guide titled ‘Indian R&D captives – 2008’ was also released during the event.

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