Global leadership from India Time is now: ZMC

According to Pari Natarajan,Chief Executive Officer,Zinnov Management Consulting,Though India offers a significant cost arbitrage when compared with the costs in US and Europe,the R&D centers in India are losing out on certain key aspects because of excessive focus on cost. While cost control is the top priority,aspects like innovation,competency creation and leadership roles often get over looked.

While a few companies have been fairly successful in uplifting the maturity of the centers in India,others should also start looking beyond cost control to bring in global leadership and innovation capabilities at the center which would help them move up the value chain and become critical centers for the parent organization,he added.

The study said that there are three key opportunities that India leadership needs to tap to transform into global leaders:

Penetrate Domestic/Emerging Markets: Cumulative opportunity in domestic and emerging markets is indeed more than developed markets and these clusters of emerging geographies have very similar needs that can be tapped into easily.

Solutioning through Business Model Innovation: India has a very strong legacy of exporting business models. Influence top line growth through innovative business models.

Global market innovation: With the vast availability of skilled workforce,R&D centers in India can derive global market innovations at a significantly lesser cost

The current level of maturity of R&D related work in India for many of the centers definitely has a scope of improvement,given the strong R&D ecosystem that India has been able to build over the last 25 years. There is an urgent need for MNC R&D centers to focus beyond cost efficiency and aspire to become global strategic partners.