.....contd.

    Of late, there has been a noticeable spurt in PD activities especially in the automobile sector. TVS set the ball rolling by launching the highly successful Scooty though it flopped with the Spectra scooter in a shifting market. This did not stop Bajaj from going into overdrive with a raft of new scooter models. In the meantime Tata Engineering made a huge impact on the Indian psyche with the launch of its Indica. And Mahindras are steadily rolling out a variety of vehicles including and electric powered 3-wheeler. Foreign design firms like IDEA, Cagiva, Seymour Powell and Tokyo R&D have aided some of these efforts.

    Simultaneously, top Indian IT companies are making some headway abroad in automobile component design by winning contracts from American and European car companies while their international counterparts are introducing Indian OEMs (and hopefully parts vendors whose R&D may be woefully inadequate) to the benefits of computer based design and engineering. All this activity bodes well for PD in India as, worldwide, the automobile industry is a forerunner of PD practices in the larger engineering industry. The need of the hour is to consolidate our efforts and accelerate them in the coming decade.

    The missing link in all this seems to be the CEO of the Indian industrial firm and his/her top management team. They have to show the foresight and dynamism - in short, leadership - to catalyse organisational efforts in PD. The levers they can use are basically three: PD resources, PD processes and PD priorities. What may be crucial are the linkages among these entities rather than each one in isolation.