Why India Inc Must Pivot From Cost Advantage to Innovation

For decades, India Inc has used two levers of growth: cost arbitrage for the global market and scale for the domestic market. Outsourcing made India the world’s back office, while a rising middle class guaranteed scale at home. Together, they fuelled growth, created jobs and made billionaires of Indian entrepreneurs.

But that formula has run its course. It won’t power the dream of Viksit Bharat. Today geopolitics is fracturing supply chains, technology is becoming a lever of power and capital flows are following national interests.

For this reason, the next phase of India Inc’s growth will be defined not by how cheaply it can deliver but by what new technology products it can create. The world has entered a phase where intellectual properties, patents and brand power matter more than ever before.

The following interviews and columns map that shift. Global capability centres, once synonymous with cost efficiency, are being recast as design and innovation hubs, filing patents and shaping global product pipelines. The electric-vehicle transition is India’s test case in competing in a tech race defined by subsidies, trade barriers and shifting geopolitics.

Building global brands, meanwhile, has moved from aspiration to necessity; in a fractured world; trust and soft power determine market access as much as price or distribution. And at the frontier lies deep tech: AI, quantum, space, climate tech—the arenas where the next pools of value will be created. Fall behind here, and India risks exclusion from the technologies that will set the terms of trade in this century.

For India Inc and its start-ups, the signal is clear: the era of easy growth is over. To reach $10trn and beyond, innovation isn’t optional. They need to buckle up.