MNC R&D centers in India deal with 'high' complexity of products as opposed to the perception: Says Zinnov
Framework to help organizations assess maturity of their global R&D centers to deliver high value.
Zinnov Management Consulting, a leading management consulting firm, in a recently released whitepaper said that ‘cost’ and ‘talent’, the historic drivers of R&D, are now giving way to innovation and access to new markets, forcing more companies to move up the maturity level.
In order to help gauge the maturity level of each of these MNC R&D centers in India and facilitate them to move up the value chain, Zinnov Management Consulting has developed a unique ‘Maturity Model Framework’. This unique framework will actually help these R&D centers in India build a stronger business case with their US headquarters. This model can be used to benchmark organizations across R&D verticals, in order to help companies understand where they are positioned in the maturity curve relative to their peers.
The recently conducted benchmarking exercise reveals that less than 10% products being executed at the India center are in the ‘Product Leadership’ stage and 50% of them are still in the ‘Engineering Support’ stage. Most of the products in lower stages of maturity are high complexity products. Around 60% of products analyzed were either supporting or leading the product management function. The maturity stages seem to have a positive correlation with the age of the products in India. Products less than three years old in India were generally found to be in lower stages of maturity while most of the products in higher stages of maturity were more than seven years old in India.
Mr. Pari Natarajan, Chief Executive Officer, Zinnov Management Consulting, Pvt. Ltd, said, “Lack of technical and managerial talent is the key hurdle for Indian centers as they try to move up the maturity curve. However, the Maturity Model Benchmarking’ framework is an objective assessment tool that can be effectively used by these centers to build a business case for global stakeholders.”
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This unique framework categorizes the various stages of maturity of an R&D centre and has listed them as follows:
Level 1: Engineering Support: Team supports another global team by contributing in coding, testing and QA part of the PDLC. Team lacks key design skills and product knowledge and hence is dependent on other centers for product and domain expertise.
Level 2: Module Leadership: Team develops complete module(s) (including design) for a product with minimal or no support from another global center team. Team has key design skills and fair product knowledge to manage the module autonomously.
Level 3: Engineering Leadership: Team is in charge of engineering design and development of the complete product. The team has strong domain expertise and complete product knowledge to execute product design, module design and integration. The team may be supported by other teams on coding, testing and QA activities.
Level 4: Product Leadership: Along with Engineering Leadership, the team is also responsible for business aspects such as Product Management, Customer interaction, Channel Partnerships, etc. The team devises the product roadmap and works closely with the engineering teams to get the product to market on time.
Last but not the least, this framework will not only help these MNC R&D centres in India identify gaps in maturity and capability in the current mode of operations, but also understand and gauge their maturity relative to their competitors, added, Mr. Natarajan.
About Zinnov Management Consulting Pvt. Ltd
Founded in 2002, Zinnov – meaning Zeal in Innovation – is a leading management consulting company providing services in the area of Offshore Advisory, Market Expansion and Human Capital Optimization to Fortune 1000 companies. Zinnov works collectively with clients to tackle prevailing organizational challenges by analyzing the changing dynamics, improving performance, and building institutional capability. The services delivered to its clients through advanced reasoning and analytical techniques, provides solutions that help in integrating organizational vision, business definition and processes.