India's Giant step into R&D

There are over a million articles written over Outsourcing and still a million more which exhort developing economies in Asia to move away from what in the West is perceived as low-cost labor to more exhausting and lucrative R&D work. William Gates Junior exhorted Indian companies to do the same during a recent interview.

Seeds of R&D in India
To give an example Texas Instruments started a development centre back in the mid-80's when India couldn't tell silicon chips from potato chips, and even as we are stuck in 2009, in the cusp of ever man, woman, and child owning a cellular phone, India does not have a silicon fabricating facility, period. The fact of the matter is the quality and quantity of work that has been outsourced is multi-pronged. To say there is no R&D work done in India would be a complete fallacy. However, it is a fact that we talk about MNCs setting up R&D facilities in India to hire fresh graduates out of the IITs and NITs in a bid to both get them to work on developmental projects rather than research in the word R&D - if you are looking for outputs from pure academic research as well, India is probably a few centuries behind America, where the Academic-Industry partnership is very strong. Some of the major funders of science and technological innovation in that country are the NSF, and the Armed Forces, alongwith NASA and of course the IBM's and the GE's.

Crossing the chasm
India has on account of grinding poverty and being young as a nation skipped several crucial steps into building itself in the way the US has. What has happened is, we've skipped the stage of landline phones and moved into cellular phones, we've skipped an entire generation of desktops and moved into laptops and netbooks, we've moved away from wireline services and moved into the digital internet. India definitely has good institutions partly thanks to the initial planning comissions and their utopian goals to solve India's problems, so atleast on paper we could emulate our Western counterparts.

IP enforcement
Westerners who understand the concept of Intellectual Property find it extremely painful to explain such concepts to their poorer counterparts in Asia. At least in India IP protection has in some form both help and infringement-related enforcement, mostly due to pressure from companies that want them enforced. Most of these companies are not Indian. Thankfully we don't have the RIAA and its draconian lawyers, knocking down our doors for illegally downloading music. Piracy bites India in a big way, but unfortunately if you are going to charge exorbitant amounts for music it will probably never sell, and neither will the movie, atleast in India. Promoters and movie producers would be a little kinder with music piracy than they would with movie piracy. We don't have movies run more than a month anymore, and the money they make from the multiplexes in those 30 days can make or break a production house. It needs the protection of the Indian Government. Chinese IP protection on the other hand is horrendous. You get snazzed up i-phones which are cheaper and better than the OEM's, you get phones without IMEI numbers lining up streets in Connaught Place to Chor Bazaar, its an unhealthy and dangerous trend for the world to put up with. Plus Chinese authorities do not or will not understand and enforce intellectual property infringement regulation, of which I am to understand there aren't many.

Why R&D isn't too bad for India
India as an R&D hub would suit Indian mentalities as well - we are a nation which likes to have our food simmered rather than straight off the microwave. However I see some large bottlenecks in the emergence of India as an R&D hub on its own two feet. We have companies which race each other to the bottom in competing for crummy projects. There is no onus to develop a solution, but to provide one for a problem at hand. And this is generally done with the help of 20-somethings fresh out of college, and the projects are again manned by 20-somethings who went through the same grind. There is no scope for excellence, but the onus is on getting the job done, and adding a little sliver to the company bottom line in $-to-Rupee terms.

Pure research works involves a large degree of risk taking and the ability to bounce back if there are no large tangible rewards. In the product development arena, the money that you can get back in return is enormous.
Indian companies primarily are not cut out to work as R&D organizations in the current forms. This is because of the purported hierarchical structures, and massive egos which come into play while executing work of this sort. Homegrown governmental organizations like the HAL, DRDO, ISRO have done well but the number of failures not in public domain would be quite appalling. Indian companies would need a massive organizational thinking to be able to execute a product development initiative. However, its not so much in the execution but also in the marketing and salesmanship of such a product that would affect its future. Brand India is not as big as a 2nd grade East European name, on account of the constant compromise Indian companies makes on the quality of its products made for domestic and foreign consumption - you can even see this in the IT sector with companies very often having problems in their requirements not being met, and this doesn't reflect too well on us. There is no brand equity in brand India for any potential buyers to buy into, but of course things are changing as more and more companies - albiet not Indian - set up R&D facilities in India.
But the basic issues need to be addressed for Indian companies to take a leaf out of. We need to be more serious about time management and quality, and try to pick up these things from the Japanese for their impeccable professional behavior in this regard. If we wish to be taken seriously for what we do, we need to pay serious respect to who we sell our goods to.