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Sunday , May 11, 2008 at 2130 hrs There appears to be an upward worldwide trend when you look at innovation and entrepreneurship. Fuelling this trend is good old research and development (R&D) efforts in different parts of the world. As one entrepreneur puts it, R&D is the life blood for companies and entrepreneurs. It is out of R&D efforts that corporations increase their profits or new companies are born. A good example of this is Silicon Valley-based VMware, the virtualisation company that was born out of the research findings of Prof Rosenblum and his students at Stanford.

There is a definite upward trend in R&D at a global level. This upward trend is confirmed by the findings of the latest Booze Hamilton’s annual study on The Customer Connection: Global Innovation 1000 that looked at R&D spending by the world’s top 1000 corporations. Additionally, the study also uncovered that there is an overall connection between innovation and corporate goals and directions. How much did the world’s top 1000 corporations spend on R&D? How about $446.7 billion? Out of this $127 billion was spent on computing health care and $74 billion on auto.

The question then arises is where does R&D for these innovations come from? Universities, research organisations, corporations and business are leading the R&D efforts in various parts of the world. It should come as no surprise that US universities lead the way in R&D, where a good portion of the patents filed are by people of Indian and Chinese origin. For instance, Prof Kerr of Harvard Business School recently released a study on Ethnic Scientific Communities and International Technology Diffusion, where he discovered that 8-10% of the patents filed in the US are from the Indian and Chinese communities. Prof Kerr via an e-mail interview said, “The ethnic contributions have been a substantial boon to US innovation and business leadership for a long period.”