Opened in 2000 with 275 scientists and engineers, the John F. Welch Technology Center in Bangalore now employs 4,300 – or one in six – of GE’s researcher “technologists” worldwide. This year, that ratio is projected to increase to one in four.

“Why India? It’s very straightforward,” says Guillermo Wille, the center’s managing director. “There are few other countries where you can hire such large numbers of engineers so quickly. China is comparable but after that, nothing comes close.”

Bangalore is well known for its vast outsourcing sector, but what is less well known is that the city nicknamed India’s Silicon Valley is becoming a globally important center of innovation. Alongside GE, multinationals such as Microsoft, Intel, Google, IBM, and Britain’s Tesco supermarket chain, are opening research and development centers there. The Welch Center is GE’s biggest outside the U.S.

The research potential of India’s engineering talent pool first drew attention in 1985, when Texas Instruments opened a technology center in Bangalore. Today, more than 200 multinationals have R&D centers in the country. The ventures aim to tap the country’s multitude of engineers, as well as the enormous pool of expatriate PhDs working in the West who are eager to return home.

This trend of moving up the value chain is just beginning and there is still so much to do in terms of overcoming India’s chaotic infrastructure problems and improving its education systems, but I see the rise of these multinational R&D centers in India and China as driving a profound shift in innovation as significant as the move from mainframe computing to the personal computer. I believe we are at the cusp of a new paradigm in which innovation will happen in India and China first, and then it will go to the rich countries.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about emerging markets in the news