send via emailFace to face with the globalisation of R&D
India offers a rich source of young, high-quality science and engineering talent that is well equipped to tackle research and development tasks for global markets, according to early feedback from a study trip to Bangalore by EIRMA’s Global Open Focus Group.
“The common denominator is that the companies we visited are proud to be in India and tapping into the talents of a very young nation, which has a median age of about 25 years,” said Dietmar Theis, co-chairman of the group with Leopold Demiddeleer, director of future businesses at Solvay. “It really is a country with very strong potential for further development, which is why it is worthwhile being there.”
The members of the Global Open Focus Group, drawn from several of the industrial sectors represented within the EIRMA membership, visited Bangalore in the second week of March 2009. The trip was part of the Group’s two-year investigation of the globalisation of R&D, which is expected to culminate in a report to the EIRMA Representatives’ Round Table meeting in January 2010.
The Group met with senior R&D managers and team members from several industrial sectors, including: Dr Mukul Saxena, vice president and head of Siemens Corporate Technology India; Dr Sudhakar Dantiki, director of R&D at the International Research Center of Akzo Nobel Car Refinishes India; Dr Prakash Nayak, managing director, Corporate Research Center, ABB Global Industries & Services; and Dr R Raju Konduru, managing director of Procter & Gamble Home Products Limited.
They also spent time with Dr Mary Mathews, associate professor, and Prof Madhavan of the Society for Innovation and Development at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), to get a more academic insight into India’s R&D eco-system and its role within global R&D networks.
Skills or costs?
The teams we met were really Indian teams led by people with very strong international experience
“In practically all these cases the Indian research centres are serving not only the Indian market but also the global market,” said Theis. “The models vary, but the teams we met were really Indian teams led by people with very strong international experience. Most of the senior managers had been educated in the US, UK or elsewhere in Europe, before returning to India and had a very strong ability to interface between international market requirements and local skills, which is absolutely necessary if you want to have global R&D.
“I was also very struck by the high quality of the senior management, who had both this international experience and the ability to get across how and why they were doing things, in very good English,” added Theis.
And it wasn’t all about cost.
Cost does play a role but it is not the highest priority issue
“Most of the people we visited said the most important reason for being there was the ability to tap into the young, strong, bright engineers and R&D people available,” said Theis. “Cost does play a role but it is not the highest priority issue.”
Trip report and final report
The Group has returned from Bangalore and will now work together to present a much fuller report on the insights they gained and the conclusions they have drawn from the study trip at this year’s Annual Conference, to be held in Budapest, Hungary, from 3 to 5 June.
“I think that even with the multisectoral, multidisciplinary team that went to Bangalore, each member got some value out of the visit,” said Theis, “ although the ways they use that learning to transform their own organisations will vary.”
At the beginning of the Focus Group, the team set out a number of questions that it wanted to answer during the two-year project. The overriding concern was to understand the most effective ways to innovate in a world in which R&D is becoming much more globalised, and in which sizeable companies and research organisations are emerging in unexpected places. The team was also concerned about the effective management of global R&D centres, the role that headquarters R&D teams should take, how to network in this environment, and global knowledge management.
Other issues included how to recruit effectively at home and abroad, cross-cultural training, and how to integrate people from various places within the organisation, or from outside it, into effective teams. There were also the usual concerns about intellectual property management, and how to implement a strategic R&D agenda throughout a globalised network of internal R&D and external partnerships.
The Bangalore trip report will form an important building block in the team’s efforts to produce a final report, due for presentation in early 2010, that will address the issues set out when the project started.
The Global Open Focus Group members include:
- Urs Burckhardt, manager of corporate research at Swiss materials processing company Sika Technology
- Edwige Chassagneux, Focus Group support and PhD candidate, EIRMA
- Christophe Claeys, process and energy group manager at gases company Air Liquide
- Pascal del Gallo, R&D group manager of chemicals generation group at gases company Air Liquide
- Jeroen Deleu, director and member of the board at Dutch innovation consultancy SIRRIS
- Pascale Escaffre, vice president, innovation and development, home and personal nonwovens at fibre composite and speciality papers company Ahlstrom
- Volker Goeke, Linde group leader, process development, R&D development at gases and engineering company Linde
- Julio Danin Lobo, ABB group leader at power and automation company ABB
- Michèle Le Guével, Focus Group support, EIRMA
- Thad Maloney, former vice president of paper-making company KCL
- An van de Vel, manager scientific relations at materials company Umicore
- Hans Vercammen, business unit manager, product innovation, SIRRIS
- Dominiek Verkinderen, senior project manager, at metals transformation, materials and coatings company Bekaert