Innovation and Global Competitiveness: Case of India's Manufacturing Sector

In the post-liberalization period, India has slowly but steadily tried to foster innovation to improve competitive efficiency of Indian manufacturing and thus boost global competitiveness of the industrial sector. Foreign direct investment was looked upon as a major source of technology paradigm shift; in recent times, industrial firms have been investing overseas, even in countries to which they used to export, based on their technological capabilities. Firms in Indian manufacturing industries have also attempted to bring about technological upgrades through imports of design and drawings (disembodied technology) against lump sum, royalty and technical knowhow fees, and imports of capital machinery (embodied technology) where the technology is embodied in the capital good itself.

This volume comprises empirical contributions on this emerging phenomenon, on a range of issues including the role of R&D; mergers, acquisitions and technological efforts; technological determinants of competitive advantages; the role of small and medium enterprises and regional patterns; technological efforts and global operations; and the role of industrial clusters in promoting innovation and competitiveness.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Innovation and Development.

N. S. Siddharthan is Honorary Professor at the Madras School of Economics, India. His current research interests are technology and globalisation, international economics, multinational corporations, and industrial organization.

K. Narayanan is Institute Chair Professor in the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. His research interests span the areas of industrial economics, international business, socio-economic empowerment through ICT, environmental economics, economic impacts of climate change and development economics.