Exploring R&D acceleration with a special
focus on India’s patent surge, GDP spend gap,
and strategies for innovation leadership.
Varun Prakash
Partner | McKinsey & Company
Thank you to MMA for continuing this tradition of bringing together some of the most pressing conversations happening in Indian industry today. R&D and innovation is a topic I care about deeply, and it is a real privilege to be on stage with leaders who are at the absolute forefront of this in their respective sectors.
Let me set a little context before we hear from our panelists. There are three broad questions I want us to explore: why R&D matters, how India is doing, and how we accelerate. On the first, our research surveying more than 100 companies found that companies investing seriously in R&D and innovation outperform the market at three times the total return to shareholders of bottom performers, and are fifty percent more likely to outperform on a P&L basis. When you do R&D well, it translates directly into business performance.
On how India is doing — the picture is genuinely positive. The number of patents coming out of India has tripled in the last five years.
On WIPO’s Global Innovation Index, we have moved from a ranking of 81 to 38. But there is another side to this: India currently spends around 0.6% of GDP on R&D, while the US, China, and Israel spend between 2.5 and 5%.
That gap is the challenge this session is designed to address. And on acceleration — China’s transformation in high-tech sectors including batteries happened in a decade, not half a century. It is entirely possible to make material change in a reasonably short span of time.
Dr. Bala Tanjore
Chief Product & Technology Officer | Impacteers
R&D is often treated as a big jargon, but research is something that happens everywhere. The people who organized this very session did a lot of research — whom to invite, what sequence makes sense, how to keep the energy in a room at 3 in the afternoon. From the moment I landed and figured out the best route to this venue, I was doing research. So let us strip away the mystique: research and development is simply the impetus that drives a human being in any context, and when it creates a total effect on the ecosystem around them, it becomes a value-change for the organization.
One of the most important things research teaches you is not what to do, but what not to do. That distinction is under-appreciated. Over the sessions this morning, every distinguished speaker touched on AI. I see AI very differently from the way it is often framed. The human brain uses just two percent of our body mass, runs on twenty percent of our oxygen, and yet stores every childhood memory with astonishing fidelity. To query a GPT model today, the GPU compute, the processing, the energy required — it is massive in comparison. I have spent three doctoral degrees in the AI space and worked with some extraordinary people. My conclusion is that innovation is fundamentally about adding value to your customer. AI, quantum computing — these are all enablers. The only meaningful question is: what value am I creating?
That is the lens I brought to Apple when I worked closely with Steve on landmark projects, and it is the lens I bring to Impacteers today, where we are building the world’s first AI-powered B2T platform. Steve used to say: making something simple is the most complex thing you can do. That is still the hardest part of any R&D endeavour. The culture of an R&D function has to start from a relentless obsession with value — not technology for its own sake, not tools, not cost alone — but what tangible difference does this make in someone’s life? When that driver is in the DNA of a team, the R&D function grows. And India right now is at exactly that inflection point. Homegrown LLMs are emerging. Companies like Sarvam AI are winning large government mandates. I surrendered my US citizenship to come back here because I see enormous potential, and I am proud to be part of it.
Dr. Kanakasabapathi Subramanian
Senior Vice President | Ashok Leyland
R&D is a topic that is very close to my heart — I have spent a lifetime in it. I started as a scientist in micro and nanotechnology at GE in the United States, working on problems that seemed like science fiction even then. One of the earliest and most durable lessons I learned was that the most successful R&D actually flows backwards from the application. As blue-eyed scientists, we have a tendency to dream up a favourite problem, find a quiet corner and work on it. But what actually gives birth to a great R&D project is a thorough study of the market. You start with a need that will exist in the future, then work backwards to figure out what technology needs to be invented. The result is obvious: when you succeed, the market is already there and waiting.
R&D is also inherently multi-disciplinary. The automobile sector, which was for decades populated almost entirely by mechanical engineers, is today a rich intersection of mechanical, electronics, materials science and AI. There is a saying that innovation happens at the intersection of disciplines, and that is deeply true. Individual disciplines are starting to saturate. It is at the crossover where fresh capability emerges. At Ashok Leyland, we now work on new fuel vehicles spanning natural gas, hydrogen, electric and hybrid powertrains, light-weighting with alternative materials, and software-defined vehicles. We believe a vehicle is like a newborn child — it arrives with capable hardware but relatively little software. Our job is to build the infrastructure that allows it to learn, adapt, and develop its own personality for each customer and application.
There is also a critical distinction I want to draw: R&D and innovation are not the same thing. R&D has budgets, timelines, processes and deliverables. Innovation is intentionally chaotic — it deliberately lacks rigid process because it is driven by culture. The culture of the company has to be conducive, and if it is not, you have to create it within your own ecosystem. Innovation is the pipeline that feeds R&D. And on the question of how to inspire that culture: pose unsolvable problems. We actually did this at Ashok Leyland. My daughter, when she was very young, lost her grandfather and asked if she could speak to him. It sounds impossible. But we built an AI tool that learns from my mother — her voice, her patterns of speech — so that after her time, I will still be able to speak to something that responds as she would. Two minutes before you heard that, you thought it was unsolvable. That is the kind of problem that becomes a natural magnet for energy and enthusiasm within a team.
Another practice: go back to first principles. I once asked a class of sixth-standard students to draw a 60-degree angle without a protractor. Almost everyone knew the procedure. But when I asked why that procedure gives 60 degrees, the whole class went silent. We stop questioning. We mug up the procedure, pass the exam, and forget to ask why. We started a programme at Ashok Leyland of returning to the very basics of science — and the innovation that spawned was remarkable. Ramanujan said an equation has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God. What he meant was: what is nature actually telling you through that equation? That philosophy, practised day in and day out, inspires genuine innovation.
AI+People, a rare combination
Ganesh Adiga
Vertical Head – EV | Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd
For an electric vehicle manufacturer — and for every R&D engineer working in this space — this is the golden era. Engine-driven vehicles have been around for centuries. The innovation on powertrains has been continuous across all that time. The electric vehicle has seen its entire development arc compressed into less than two decades, and there is so much more ahead. New technologies are being industrialised at a rate of practically one every alternate month. That scale of change is the backdrop for everything we do.
Let me tell you what we actually did at Mahindra. In September 2021, we drew the first ever sketch of what would become our electric vehicle portfolio. We achieved SOP — start of production — in September 2024. Flat three years. And we did it starting from a position of severe skill scarcity. Most of the team, including myself, was transferring in from other functions. We were learning electric technology as we were trying to bring it to market. What made it possible was a clear understanding of customer needs, the technology available, and above all, a willingness to learn. When that willingness exists, the skill follows naturally.
The platform architecture we chose was a deliberate R&D decision: 92% common parts across multiple variants — same motor, same battery, same electronics, same underbody. The customer sees a range of different vehicles and gets choice. The supplier sees scale across the entire range. That common foundation liberated the core R&D team to focus on genuine innovation rather than constantly reinventing basics. And today, the research happening within our facilities in Chennai is genuinely foundational — we are determining the optimal carbon coating thickness on battery electrodes to control how fast lithium ions intercalate during charging, with the goal of a 19-minute charge cycle from 15% to 85%. That is not cost optimisation. That is value creation.
On the question of whether Indian EV innovation is merely about cost efficiency — I want to push back on that framing. The primary objective has always been to give the customer something they genuinely value. Cost matters, but it is not the driver. On AI, we are seeing it work at both ends of the product development process. At the front end, AI is synthesising customer feedback from tens of thousands of service line items to tell us directly what we should be working on — something humanly impossible to do at that scale. At the back end, AI is dramatically accelerating the time it takes to move a simulation result from red to green. Both of these compress the development cycle and improve the quality of what we launch. The missing ingredient when AI fails in engineering contexts is always the same: you need people who understand both the domain and the technology. That combination is rare and precious, and we are investing hard in building it.
