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: 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.”

In India the R&D impetus is coming not from universities and research organisations. “Instead, private industries are leading R&D efforts in India,” points out Wadhwa, Duke Executive in Residence and Harvard Fellow. Wadhwa is heading a research team that is looking at R&D trends in India and China in six different industries that include: Pharmaceutical, Semiconductors, Aerospace, Cell Phones, Computer Networking and Automotive. Their initial research findings revealed that the number of patents from India is on the increase in all these sectors. “GE is developing all sorts of medical devices, steam turbines and locomotives, while HCL is doing some amazing things in the aeronautical area. Wipro, HCL, Infosys R&D labs are doing a whole lot of interesting and new things,” Wadhwa adds.

Wadhwa’s research is borne out if you look at the number of US corporations that have increased their R&D presence in India and in many cases the Indian R&D centres headed by US-trained researchers. For instance, Dr Naresh Gupta, MD of Adobe India also heads Adobe’s R&D labs in India, China, Japan and Romania. Gupta has a PhD from a

US university and has a bunch of patents to his credits, some of those patents resulted in key features of Adobe’s popular Photoshop and other products. As head of global R&D Gupta’s task is to look for new business opportunities in emerging markets, where the needs and desires of customers is very different from those in developed countries. Adobe spends about 20% of its annual revenue on its global R&D efforts and its revenue in 2007 was $3.158 billion and $2.575 billion in 2006.