As they say, looks can often be misleading. At first glance, the Engineering and Research Centre (ERC) inside the Tata Motors' factory in Pimpri doesn't seem to be the kind of place where great ideas are born.
The paint on the walls is a dull shade of blue and white, the same colour as the uniform that employees sport, there are helmets strewn all over the place, the window panes in the visitors' toilets are broken and the chairs in the long boardroom are anything but comfortable. To the untrained eye, everything about the place seems practical and mundane.
But then a casual visitor to the plant may not quite know this: The ERC is the nerve-centre of the biggest research and development effort that any Indian corporation has mounted in recent times.
Today, the company has about 5,500 people working in R&D spread across India and the rest of the world. At any given point in time, there are several R&D projects going on both at the company and inside many global universities, different start-up companies, and different vendor partners that Tata has collaborated with across the US, Europe and India. ...
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11:55 AM, Feb 29, 2012
