Industrial Visit @ ABSTC

11 October,2012

A visit to the Aditya Birla Science & Technology Company on Thursday, accompanied by Prof. Massimo Magni, Professor for OB & HRM, MISB.

The Aditya Birla Science and Technology Company (ABSTC) is the corporate research and development centre for the Aditya Birla Group. Located in Taloja, just outside of Mumbai in India, ABSTC supports the broad diversity of the Group's businesses through multi-disciplinary teams of expert scientists and engineers who lead fundamental and applied research projects.

ABSTC is the corporate R&D centre for Aditya Birla Group and an example of Indian businesses' increasing focus on  R&D, as Indian corporations spreads out globally. Interesting to note that till now only TATA group has invested in similar R&D centers.

Choosing to open up a corporate (centralized) R&D centre vis-a-vis small business R&D centres for a business conglomerate like Aditya Birla Group, brings together the expertise and innovation under one roof at its centre at Mumbai. It now looks after every need for the group including but not limited to 

• Developing in-house technologies to stop reliance on licensed technologies.
• Short term business needs for group companies ranging form fertilizer,cement,textiles etc.
• Rescaling and expanding businesses.
• Catering to long term business propositions and solutions.
• Benchmarking the products for quality assurance.
• Contract research work for other companies.

The centre has already filed 30 patents since its inception in 2006.

Learning the business application and marketing principles from the legendary CTO Mr. Luca Fountana, we looked at the business model, the organizational structure along with some of the cutting edge research work going on in the company. Some interesting take-aways :

• A corporate R&D centre as opposed to business R&D centers as in Dupont and Honeywell has its advantages, specially for long term growth.
• Dedicated in-house R&D unit for the group has financial advantages as well...tax breaks.
• Open innovation partnerships with universities help in developing fundamentally superior technologies at low cost.
• It undertakes research work for the outside non competing companies as well, thus capitalizing on it s superior facilities.

Anurag Singhal

MISB Bocconi

Class of 2012-2014

anurag.singhal@misbbocconi.com