From ideas to industry: How research labs can power India's Green Frontier

How India can build the institutions that turn ideas into factories, data centres and global advantage

The Nobel economics prize committee has been remarkably consistent in highlighting what drives sustainable prosperity. It just awarded Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt for showing how culture, institutions and creative destruction continuously translate invention into productivity. That prize extends a line from Robert Solow’s growth accounting, which isolated technological progress as the dominant source of long-run gains, through Paul Romer’s logic for making innovation endogenous, to William Nordhaus’s climate change analysis. Read together, these prizes are a policy manual. Nations grow rich and resilient by building institutions that generate ideas and scale them quickly, while simultaneously preserving natural capital. India’s version is the Green Frontier development model: Growth that marries global competitiveness with sustainability. 

For India, that means we need to build the technological institutions that will be the engines of sustainable prosperity. Countries have accomplished this by building powerful innovation ecosystems with corporate research labs as a key driver. These corporate labs have been sustained with patient capital and their inventions have been scaled up rapidly. Bell Labs remains the benchmark because it fused first principles with engineering and shipped results into the economy. Bell Labs inventions include the transistor, information theory, lasers, CCDs (charged coupled device), Unix and C, earning 10 Nobels and five Turings along the way. Note that the artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) technological breakthrough (namely transformer models), came from a single paper written by eight researchers at Google Brain, Google’s AI research lab. 

Germany’s Fraunhofer Institutes pair predictable base grants with demanding contract revenue, so applied labs stay solvent and sharp. Japan funds the full arc from research to demonstration to deployment, allowing decade-long bets while enforcing milestones. China’s lesson is that highly competitive businesses can drive frontier research & development (R&D), turning firms into engines of productisation. The common thread is sustained funding that lets labs compound learning over time. Our large business houses must rise to the challenge. They control supply chains, have immense financial resources, and terrific customer access. As a result, they can move ideas into factories, grids, and data centres faster than any ministry or university alone. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has provided the policy framework. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) is designed to anchor strategy and industry-university collaboration. The Research, Development and Innovation scheme offers long-tenor, low-cost capital to de-risk first-of-a-kind investments. Sector missions, such as IndiaAI, add programmatic channels. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) recognition and Section 35 deductions lower the effective cost of in-house R&D. 

There are many frontier technology areas that we need to master. For instance, in AI, we can use our digital public infrastructure as a population-scale testbed, but we should focus labs on evaluation, safety toolchains and domain models that governments and enterprises can actually buy. In semiconductors, we can concentrate on advanced packaging, power electronics and specialty nodes tied to mobility and grids; baking Indian intellectual property (IP) into components that ship globally. In quantum computing, we must sequence near-term sensing and secure communications first, while building error-mitigation and hardware capacity for computing.

 

In green energy, we should push for advances in battery chemistry, power electronics, and develop a serious small modular reactor programme to deliver firm, clean power for data centres and electrified industry. In space, we must move from missions to markets: On-orbit autonomy and analytics that convert pixels into decisions for farms, cities, and coasts. In life sciences, we can pair privacy-preserving data platforms with manufacturing, rapid trial networks and clinical AI, so discovery becomes deployment.

 

Companies need to attract and develop the talent that will power our research labs. We need to pay researchers global salaries, match them with corporate advisers, and guarantee access to compute and lab time. ANRF-backed chairs and returnee professorships should seed leadership. Professionalise the roles that make labs run (technicians, metrology specialists, biosafety managers) with accredited programmes and clear wage ladders. We must provide these professionals with merit-linked careers that let the best people do their life’s work at corporate research labs.

 

What must large business groups do now? First, commit capital at scale and in public: Set R&D intensity targets by segment, with 10-year lab charters that survive leadership changes. Second, create independent lab governance: Outstanding high-integrity leaders, technical fellows with runway, milestone gates that protect ambition, and standard IP-sharing with universities and startups. Third, be the first buyer: Treat early procurement from your own labs as strategic insurance, not cost. Fourth, report research pipelines to investors with the same discipline you apply to capacity additions. Capital markets will reward clarity.

 

The government’s job is to maintain a stable policy framework and procure homegrown technology. When the state buys the first wave, firms invest in the second. This is how the Nobel storyline can become India’s story: Solow’s residual is built inside dark factories and hyperscale AI centres; Romer’s endogenous growth is managed in boardrooms; Nordhaus’s climate constraint is answered by technology that lowers both cost and carbon; the laureates Mokyr’s and Aghion–Howitt’s arc from culture to mechanism is closed by research institutions that reward discovery and diffusion together.

 

A decade from now, our question should not be whether India can build Bell-class labs. It should be which corporate labs anchor our advantage across AI, chips, quantum, green energy, space and life sciences, and how quickly their ideas embed in factories, data centres, satellites, hospitals and farms. That is how technology becomes a durable growth engine and how India plants its flag at the Green Frontier.

 

The author is president, Eversource Capital, and visiting professor in practice at the London School of Economics. He is a former Union minister and Lok Sabha MP. The views are personal