Nov 23

Written by: Joel Orr
11/23/2006 

The COFES India Summit, held 11/17-18/06 at the Hyatt Regency Delhi, drew an impressive variety of leaders from Indian and US organizations. We are in the process of assembling all the video, audio, and session summaries, and they will soon be posted on the COFES site.

For now, some interesting tidbits:

• India has a small number of world-class engineering schools, led by IIT; but they turn out only a few thousand graduates per year. There are many other engineering schools, but they are hamstrung by financial issues, keeping them from hiring the kind of faculty that would turn out the kind of graduates needed by the economy.
• In recent international reports on R&D spending by large firms, no Indian companies had measurable investments in R&D as a percentage of revenues.
• Infrastructure development in India is quite extensive, and stands to grow even more in coming years.
• India's population is growing rapidly, and will probably overtake China's in the near future.
• India and China, while highly competitive with each other, are also finding ways to leverage their respective strengths to help each other.

More to come! Thanks to all who participated!