Story about EMC outsourcing from Businessweek. Key line: "And what of wage arbitrage? "When we started we didn't have cost-savings as one of the key goals," Herrera said."
Of course, as pointed out in the comments, EMC isn't the only company to do this. Lots of companies have done the same in recent years.
But I fully approve of EMC treating its new Indian employees as a source of new and innovative ideas, rather than just knockoff Americans who do the same robotic labor for free. These days, a lot of people in India are using the phrase "beyond BPO." BPO was business process outsourcing - traditional outsourcing. The new outsourcing is a lot more like partnership - Indian labs doing late-stage clinical trials for drugs that will be sold in India by multinational companies, for example. In many cases, Indian companies are upgrading the concepts themselves.
yes, viz: a leading software giant (clue: look at the bottom left side of your laptop) has had a KPO initiative in India for over 3 years now (Knowledge process outsourcing). and their India think tank is made up of PhD mathematicians who try to 'learn' from giga- and terra-bytes of data by going beyond what anyone else has thought to analyze before. they have a pretty good budget and a pretty general mandate - tell us more than we know already (I paraphrase here).
ReplyDeleteregarding the dark underbelly of drug testing, doing so in India is sometimes a heap way opf getting around the stringent FDA rules, and I honestly don't know whether I approve or not. The US FDA has been criticized for being too cautious and withholding too many key drugs for too long (the AIDS drugs being a good example), but they always counter with, 'at least we did not have a thalidomide disaster in American homes....'. but is what is too unsafe for use on ailing Americans good enough for ailing Indians? As always, this is too simplified a version of a very complex debate.
Yes and no, though. Drugs sold in India must be tested in India. The same regulation holds true all over the world, and most NRA's won't relax that requirement. They might do initial testing in another part of the world, but I like to think that the dark days of injecting the world's underprivileged and uninformed public with "mystery cocktails" has passed.
ReplyDeleteWhat is perhaps more interesting is whether Indian companies are manufacturing more drugs for export all over the world (and not just generics). The indication is that they are, especially since the medications made by US and European pharma are too expensive even for developing nation governments to afford. And our NRA is WHO-approved.