Seminar by Prof Sunil Mani

Title: Innovation performance of two high technology industries from India, A comparative analysis of the pharmaceutical sector vis-a-vis computer software services industry.

To be presented by: Prof. Sunil Mani, Former Director and Visiting Faculty, CDS

Chair: Prof C Veeramani, Director, CDS

Abstract: The high technology exports from India have been growing and are almost entirely contributed by two industries: pharmaceutical and computer software services. While both these industries have achieved considerable international acclaim, their growth performance so far has been primarily thought of as driven by labour arbitrage than by innovation efforts. This is especially so in the case of the software industry, where replication rather than innovation has been identified as the cause for its fast export growth. The paper assesses this by tracing the performance of the two industries from the point of innovation using several metrics available in the literature for measuring innovation. The subsequent analysis shows that the number of innovations in both industries is rising. It is contributed chiefly by domestic firms in the pharmaceutical sector and foreign firms in the case of the computer software services industry.