Tatas see $1.1 bn incremental revenue from R&D spends annually

Tata Group, which spends around 2.5 per cent of the group turnover annually on R&D, today said its top 60 innovations this year will deliver a financial benefit of up to USD 1.1 billion annually rpt annually.
The group saw innovation by its companies jumping by a whopping 15-fold to 1,580 project entries in 2015. When began in 2006, the project had got only 101 entries. The company did not share the cumulative figures so far since 2006.
"Of these 1,580 innovations in 2015 rpt 2015, 60 of them are expected to deliver an estimated financial benefit of USD 1.1 billion annually and are expected to touch the lives of 35 million people globally over the next five years," said Tata Sons' brand custodian and chief ethics officer Mukund Rajan.

The Tata Group spent Rs 16,000 crore, which is about 2.5 per cent of the group's turnover of about USD 103 billion in 2013-14.
A similar percentage of revenue would have been spent on R&D in the previous fiscal too by the company.
"Against this, the national average spend on R&D is just 0.9 per cent of GDP," Rajan said at the 10th edition of Tata Innovista, an initiative that fosters the innovation ecosystem in the group.

Over the next three years, the group is also planning to double its published patents which stood at over 2,000, mostly by group companies in the automotive, energy, software, and materials space as of last fiscal, Tata Group Chief Technology Officer Gopichand Katragadda said.

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of innovations in the past few years, he added.
These innovations are expected to touch the lives of 35 million people globally over the next five years, in keeping with the overall vision of the group to reach a fourth of the world's population by 2025.
"Technology-differentiated innovation is a key direction the group has set for itself with a special focus on the four clusters -- defence and aerospace, retail, infrastructure and finance," Rajan said, adding accompanying them, some of our new initiatives on customer-centricity, diversity and internationalisation are driven by innovation.

In line with this, the group will have a more concerted focus on patenting innovations. In the last count, the group had over 2,000 published patents and all its leading companies in the automotive, energy, software, and materials show an improving trend on this front, Rajan said.
"There are things that are protectable at this point of time, which are not protected simply because the knowledge has to be enhanced," Katragadda said.
Increasing the global patent filings and publications is in fact among the top priorities for "technology differentiation" to realise the vision of becoming the 25th most admired brand in the world by 2025, said Katragadda.

"At a group level, the focus would be on four key areas of sustainable energy, food and wellness, consumer electronics and factory and fleet digitisation where we can leverage and build technical expertise," Katragadda added.