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India centers: New decision makers of tech MNCs
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 08 December 2009, 21:51 IST   |    8 Comments
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India centers: New decision makers of tech MNCs
Bangalore: India is no longer just a back-end centre of MNCs as emerging markets are moving up the value chain in the eyes of global conglomerates. Now, they drive the strategy, the execution and also define the roadmap. Cisco fondly calls Bangalore, entrusted with crucial responsibilities, its second headquarters. Google India had a big role to play in the revamp of the social networking site Orkut. IBM India is gearing itself for the fast lane, while EMC Corp has several patents being filed from its India centre. And Yahoo's India centre is eyeing a fair share of the action in the search deal with Microsoft, reports Business Line. According to a research report by Zinnov Management Consulting, global firms, for the last three years, have been seeing value in investing in Asia on R&D and innovation. In 2007-08, Asia accounted for 27 percent of the R&D investment made by the top 1,000 global companies. And among the emerging geographies, the contribution of India is significantly high. Of the total R&D spend in emerging markets in 2008 of $7.2 billion, India's accounted for $4.2 billion, says the report. "Since most R&D centres have matured over the years, the focus for MNCs has now shifted to innovation and access to rapid growth markets," the report added. Cost arbitrage and access to talent are no longer the only reasons favoring India. Now the major factors include innovation as well, says Chaitanya Ramalinge Gowda, Director, Zinnov. India is no longer just a back-end centre. With multi-nationals having been present in the country for a reasonable period of time, Indian centres have attained a certain maturity level and built certain capabilities from which they can only grow stronger and higher. The talent pool at the R&D centres in India has attained a critical mass over the last few years, says the Zinnov report. About 1,73,000 people work at these centres in the country. This coupled with other factors such as increased university incubations and partnership programmes, growing domestic market and a healthy start-up ecosystem, have helped strengthen the ecosystem of Centres of Excellence in India, thus paving the way for an invigorating innovation landscape in India.

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