MNC R&D centres are now increasing their filing of patents from India

BANGALORE: The Philips R&D centre started in 1996 in a small building at the heart of Bangalore. Its aims then were patently modest: provide implementation support to product teams in the Netherlands. The city did not have many multinational centres in those days. 


Philips R&D grew rapidly as its engineers started owning components of products and recently whole products. In the last few years, it has been going through another major phase in its evolution: it has become a prolific generator of patents.

Philips has filed 210 patent applications for work from its Innovation Campus, as the R&D centre is now called, most of it in the last few years, a large number for an institution based in India. And this research campus is not a one-off example.

More patents of key products for global and local markets are coming out of India research centres MNC technology firms as they reduce time-to-market, launch solutions for emerging economies and not the least, keep a lid on cost in a difficult economic environment.

While patent filings in the US have steadily grown in numbers, especially between 2006 and 2010, these R&D centres have seen a clear shift over the last few years towards business-critical global patent filings and innovations aimed at local markets.

"Foreign R&D centres have increased their dependence on all-Indians teams -- a trend reflected in the number of Indian inventors in patent applications filed by foreign companies in India and abroad in recent years," saysSunil Mani of the Centre for Development Studies, co-author of a study on 120 MNC R&D centres along with Professor Rakesh Besant of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

The share of foreign companies in US patenting by Indian inventors has gone up from a modest 16% between 1995 and 1999 to 67% between 2006 and 2010. This is not surprising.

In a recent survey of R&D centres by McKinsey, two-thirds of executives say their companies are spending part of their 2011 R&D budgets in emerging economies with most focusing on the support of either product platforms sold in global markets, or innovation for products made and sold in local, emerging-economy markets.

The global call

Adobe's local research base has seen US patents filed out of India rising from zero in 2006 to 7% in 2010 and boasts of the locally-crafted Pagemaker 7 becoming a global standard.

"We have filed a couple of hundred patents from here and do full products like Adobe Illustrator. We have also done a lot of PDF work here for readers and multiple devices," said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen in an earlier interaction.