India’s 'Thousand Talents' Moment And Models To Shift Gears In R&D

Let's Get Talent Back

Developing India's talent pool and attracting high quality personnel back home, akin to China’s "Thousand Talents" program, was another key theme of discussion by industry heads at the IPA innovation summit.

Zydus Cadila's chairman, Pankaj Patel, said that the relevant courses in India were in general old and hadn’t been adequately updated, and that for the education system to change at the national level could be a “decade thing." For industry to develop talent, "we need to create our own schools to make sure that the people who want to join us are trained," he maintained.

India’s recently announced draft policy plan to spur R&D and innovation in the biopharma and medtech segments does encompass plans to strengthen the academic curriculum to make it “dynamic and contemporary” to meet the current needs of industry, with an increased focus on “future-ready technologies” such as continuous flow technology, use of artificial intelligence and automation in manufacturing.

The difficult part, Patel noted, is that some of the requisite talent may not be there in India and getting an “Indian-origin person” to come and work in the country is “very difficult.”

“It's not about money. It's about the comfort, the way they want to do things. It has to be a combined effort of industry offering packages which are attractive and also the government offering them something special so that they are attracted to come to India,” Patel argued.

As a broad general example, he suggested a five-year tax exemption for those executives who return to India.

“We need to think about creating some innovative way to attract talent. We need 1,000 people to come to India; if 1,000 people come to India we are there. That's what I think we need to do,” Patel declared.

Lupin’s managing director, Nilesh Gupta, mirrored similar views, suggesting that if India expects to bring back the right people trained in the global system, then the foundation required would be created.

“Let's get 1,000 people back. Individual companies will bring 5, 10, 15 people back in any case but if you want to bring back 1,000 people, if you really want to bring that kind of transformational kind of cultural change, you need to do that at scale. And then there have to be some enabling policies around that,” Gupta proposed.

Cipla Limited’s vice chairperson, Samina Hamied, among a string of comments, added that India has “incredible brain capacity” and emphasized the need to focus on integration of this capacity in building the innovation ecosystem.

Sun’s chief Dilip Shanghvi, though, was more measured. The Indian industry, he said, needs to learn how to take a higher level of risk beyond what it does currently and “genuinely invest” into businesses, which have more uncertainty and higher risk but potentially entail a higher level of research.

“Whatever product that you develop is going to be compared with the best product being developed anywhere in the world; because you're developing it in India, nobody's going to cut you some slack,” he observed.

This then requires firms to create a team in or outside of India or a hybrid group, which is global, in terms of its “capability and competence and which is contemporary, constantly learns and constantly uses that learning to develop a better product,” Shanghvi maintained.

Ex-Sanofi CEO Viehbacher added another dimension to the point around bringing in people. India, he argued, doesn't necessarily need smarter people, “because you already have smart people, but they [the new talent] may bring a diversity of thought that isn't there and can stimulate different thinking.”

This stimulation of diversity of thought is important in the innovative process, he underscored.

"There's all kinds of super-intelligent, well-trained people in India. But they need to go to an environment like the US to actually realize what they can do