Innovation in Emerging Market: Data Points

"The engineering gap" in the January Economist states:

"According to the [Aspiring Minds, India], only 4.2% of India’s engineers are fit to work in a software product firm, and just 17.8% are employable by an IT services company, even with up to six months’ training. A larger share could cope in business-process outsourcing (call centres and the like). These findings are even gloomier than the 25% figure for employability that has been bandied about since 2005, when McKinsey released the results of a survey of international companies."

Download the complete report here.

The article "Grow, grow, grow", in Economist's recent report on innovation in emerging markets here, states: "McKinsey reckons that only 25% of India’s engineering graduates, 15% of its finance and accounting professionals and 10% of those with degrees of any kind are qualified to work for a multinational company."

The emerging market growth is fantastic, yet reviewing the thorough report from the Aspiring Minds raises or should raise questions for the multinationals. Also, curious if this level of employability applies to the Indian scientists as well?

In the report on innovation in emerging markets, the following statistics provide food for thought:

"The number of companies from Brazil, India, China or Russia on the Financial Times 500 list more than quadrupled in 2006-08, from 15 to 62. Brazilian top 20 multinationals more than doubled their foreign assets in a single year, 2006...

Multinationals expect about 70% of the world’s growth over the next few years to come from emerging markets, with 40% coming from just two countries, China and India...

Fortune 500 [companies] have 98 R&D facilities in China and 63 in India. ... General Electric’s health-care arm has spent more than $50m in the past few years to build a vast R&D centre in India’s Bangalore... Cisco is splashing out more than $1 billion on a second global headquarters—Cisco East—in Bangalore... Microsoft’s R&D centre in Beijing is its largest outside its American headquarters in Redmond... a quarter of Accenture’s workforce is in India."