#2 Samsung:

Place: Asia

Industry: Computer and Electronics

R&D spending

2011: $9 billion

Samsung Group is a South Korean Multinational Conglomerate Company headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul.

The company controls 100,543 patents worldwide. Of its huge number of patents, 4,551 were registered in U.S. placing the company second after IBM.

The company has two R&D centers in India, Samsung India Software Center (SISC) at Noida and Samsung India Software unit (SISO) in Bangalore. SISO is the largest R&D center outside Korea for Samsung electronics. At SISO the company had filed 600 patents with Indian Patent Office from 2003, and has 100 granted patents in India.

#1 Microsoft

Place: North America

Industry: Software and Internet

R&D spending

2011: $9 billion

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational company headquartered in Redmond, Washington. The company develops, manufactures, licenses and supports a wide range of products and services.

Microsoft Research (MSR) was created in 1991 for developing computer science ideas and adding them to Microsoft products. MSR works in the areas of Algorithms and theory, Hardware development, Human computer interaction and many more. The products are Color Barcodes, to enhance the capacity of barcodes, Data visualization, a library, GLEE graph, a layout engine, Digital Green, a farmer-generated, video-based social networking service for agricultural extension in rural India, obvious Windows iterations and many more.  

Microsoft India R&D, has a development center in Hyderabad and one has recently started in Bangalore.