PDMA 2006 CEO Roundtable

CEO Panelists

• Clemens Caicedo, Senior Director, Strat. Alliances, Latin America Human Helath, Merck & Co. Inc.
• M.P. Chugh, Chief Executive, Tata Autocomp Systems Ltd.
• Prof. Deng Mingran, Dean, School of Management, Wuhan Univ. of Tech, China
• William B. White, President, DuPont Canada
• Moderator: Deborah Wince-Smith, President, Council on Competitiveness

Council on Competitiveness representative spoke first. Purpose of the CoC is to understand competitiveness and what do we need to do to maintain the US’s competitiveness.

Competitiveness depends on innovation because we need to be able to sell high-value products around the world.

Innovation is I to the fifth power: imagination, insight, ingenuity, invention and impact and it all about the transformation of economic value.

We’re beyond the Knowledge Economy and into the Conceptual Economy.

M.P. Chugh spoke on India’s Approach to NPD and Innovation

India started with overhauling its patenting system and privatizing.

It’s not really Indian companies that are innovating; it’s the multi-nationals that happen to have offices there that are innovating. Most Indian companies innovating are just adapting products for the local market.

He believes that only people can make innovation, not policies.

We need more funding, but really what we need is more people willing to take risks.

Prof. Deng Mingran spoke on integrative innovation of product-industry-region

They plan to study the Silicon Valley to see what they can learn to improve innovation in China.

Clemens Caicedo

Latin American countries need to develop the basic institutional factors to attract capital to develop platforms for innovation.

They want to emulate Research Triangle from Virginia (?) where the economy used to be just like that of Latin America today, namely based on natural resources and commoditized.

Legislation in Brazil prevented professors from working with the private sector. That had to be reversed to foster innovation.

William B. White

We recognize now that we can’t do technology push, that we need to understand the market first, obtain insights from the market, and do market-driven innovation.

He thinks in 10 years, a roundtable like this will not be organized by geography but by market. What markets will be receptive to the most innovation, not which countries.