CHENNAI : The outsourcing model, first applied to manufacturing processes in countries like China and later to software services in India, was now being used for design, engineering and research services, said C.R. Muthukrishnan, consultant advisor, TCS Ltd.

Inaugurating the `Researchers' Meet' at Dr. MGR University, Maduravoyal, on Friday, he said that the past 15 years had seen an expansion in engineering education that had coincided with global developments conducive to job creation. General Electric (GE), IBM and HP have already set up research labs and GE would shortly be requiring around 600 doctorate holders, he said.

Dr. Muthukrishnan urged the research students to get their papers published in journals, pointing out that even B.E. students had begun doing so. Having more choice and more information about choice can radically change behaviour. Research in consumer behaviour online had shown that it violated the 80:20 rule, he said. Consumers in supermarkets, for instance, chose items from within 20 per cent of available items 80 per cent of the time, while the ratio for online shoppers could be between 60:40 and 50:50.

R.M. Vasagam, pro-chancellor, pointed out that medical and biotechnology processes, including drug testing, were other processes that were increasingly being outsourced in India. The need was for research to be applied to the making of viable commercial products, a phenomenon that could be observed in China and Japan.

R. Bhavani Shankar, principal director, said that MoUs have been finalised with the universities of South Australia and Sutherland in the U.K. Two post-graduate programmes would be initiated with the collaboration of the latter in February. Forty-two research students of the Dr. MGR Educational and Research Institute's centres in Bangalore and Maduravoyal would be making presentations on their theses.

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