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This is the fourth issue of our India Rising Perspective by Zinnov: “Engineering Europe’s Future with India”. I’m super excited that I have the opportunity to share this series with you, and thankful for the contribution by the Zinnov team.

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India’s rise as the world’s 3rd largest economy is not unfolding in isolation. It is being shaped through deep and strategic partnerships with Europe’s leading enterprises. Across Germany, the UK, and broader EMEA, companies are strengthening their global competitiveness by building long-term capability in India.

This story is no longer about outsourcing or cost efficiency. It is about engineering velocity, AI-driven transformation, workforce reinvention, and collaborative operating models that integrate India into the core of European enterprises.

To understand how this capability corridor is being built — and what it means for Europe’s future — we turn to one of the region’s leading advisors on Global Capability Centers and enterprise transformation.

In this series, Mohammed Faraz Khan, Partner at Zinnov, will share insights from across EMEA on how European organizations are designing, scaling, and transforming their Global Capability Centers in India — and how this partnership is reshaping competitiveness on both sides.

The author of today’s issue of the India Rising Perspective - Engineering Europe’s Future with India is Mohammed Faraz Khan, Partner at Zinnov.

Faraz spearheads Zinnov’s GCC Setup and Transformation practice for the EMEA region and is based in London. He advises Fortune 500 and mid-market European organizations on designing, scaling, and optimizing Global Capability Centers to accelerate globalization and unlock long-term value.

With deep expertise spanning workforce transformation, collaborative operating models, productivity enhancement, and innovation enablement, Faraz works across industries including Industrial & Engineering, Automotive, BFSI, Software & Internet, Energy, and Semiconductors. He is actively shaping the GCC narrative in EMEA and has been featured in leading publications such as The Economic Times and Fortune India.

Through this series, Faraz brings a practitioner’s lens to the evolving Europe-India partnership — grounded in enterprise transformation, AI enablement, and strategic capability building.

Enjoy the fourth issue of our series!

Part 4 of India Rising Perspective - Engineering Europe’s Future with India
By Mohammed Faraz Khan

A well-run factory can produce exceptional output.

But no factory — no matter how efficient — can build everything it needs on its own. It depends on a network of suppliers, specialists, and partners beyond its walls.

For a long time, GCCs operated like that factory. Build the right center, and you could scale engineering, support global products, and drive transformation. And for a while, that was enough.

But today, even the best-built centers are running into a different constraint. Not the lack of capability — but the limits of building everything internally.

Across European industries be it automotive, industrial engineering, healthcare and even telecom — the nature of innovation has shifted. Products, today, are no longer built within a single domain or organization.

They are orchestrated across:

No single enterprise owns all the inputs required to innovate anymore. This is where the GCC model — even in its most evolved form — begins to change.

For years, India’s role in this model was clear: talent, scale, execution. GCCs were designed to bring capabilities together within the enterprise — building engineering depth, scaling execution, and supporting global product development.

But as the inputs to innovation expand beyond organizational boundaries, GCCs are increasingly being positioned to connect with capabilities that sit outside them.

This is most visible in how enterprises are engaging with startups.

Rather than treating them as peripheral experiments, companies are using startups as targeted inputs into their innovation pipelines — accessing specialized technologies, domain-focused solutions, and faster experimentation cycles that are difficult to replicate internally.

European enterprises are now accessing something more structured:

Innovation is no longer sourced from a single location. It is drawn from a combination of startup ecosystems, academic research, corporate partnerships, and enabling infrastructure.

This is not just scale. It is ecosystem density.

What makes this ecosystem usable — not just visible — is its structure.

Different locations now play distinct roles:

This matters because it allows companies to align:

But the real advantage lies in what this enables.

In Hyderabad, platforms such as T-Hub bring together startups, enterprises, and government, allowing companies to engage with over 2,000 startups and access faster public-sector pilots — particularly in regulated domains.

In Chennai, ecosystems anchored by the IIT Madras Research Park enable closer integration between academic research and industrial applications, especially in manufacturing and robotics.

What this creates is not just optionality, but precision.

Companies are no longer relying on a single center to deliver across all domains. They are accessing specialized capability pools, each contributing a distinct layer — from frontier research to applied engineering to real-world deployment.

The advantage is no longer just access to talent — it is access to the right capability, in the right context, at the right stage of development.

Corporates are no longer just accessing India to build GCCs. They are accessing specific systems of innovation — allowing them to move faster in experimentation, build deeper in core engineering, and scale more effectively into production.

This shift is already visible in how European companies are operating.

Across Germany-headquartered GCCs, external innovation is no longer being approached through a single channel:

This is not experimentation at the margins. It is a change in how innovation is sourced. These numbers matter not because they signal activity, but because they show range.

Enterprises are building multiple routes into the ecosystem — one for discovering emerging technologies, another for shaping future capability through research, and another for converting ideas into deployable solutions inside the business.

That is an important shift. Companies are beginning to work with a more distributed model — one that allows them to engage startups, universities, internal teams, and capital networks in parallel.

Startup collaboration is one of the most visible ways this shift is playing out. But what stands out is not just the presence of these programs — it is how they are being structured.

Bosch’s DNA Nxt program, for instance, operates as a curated pipeline. Over multiple cohorts, it has attracted 6,000+ applications, worked with 90+ startups, and led to a combination of investments and joint go-to-market partnerships.

Mercedes-Benz’s Startup Autobahn India, by contrast, operates at a different scale and model. To date, it has engaged 289 startups, run 380 pilot projects, and converted approximately 30% of these into production deployments.

These programs represent different ways of integrating startups into the enterprise — one focused on curation and depth, the other on scale and conversion.

The takeaway is not simply that GCCs are working with startups.

It is how they are choosing them.

Zinnov’s AI startup analysis suggests that the most valuable partners are no longer generic AI providers, but those that:

The ecosystem is moving from “who builds AI” to “who owns the problem AI is solving”.

Where startups help accelerate innovation cycles, academia helps define where those cycles are headed. It is less about speed, and more about depth.

Across Germany-headquartered GCCs, this layer is already well established:

57% of Germany-headquartered GCCs have formal academic partnerships in India.

These collaborations are not simply talent pipelines. They are structured around research, co-development, and long-term capability building.

Take Bosch, for instance. Its long-standing engagement with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) goes beyond hiring or training. The collaboration focuses on areas such as cyber-physical systems and advanced engineering research, allowing Bosch to stay close to emerging technologies that are still at a pre-commercial stage.

A similar pattern is visible at Deutsche Bank, through its engagement with the IIT Bombay Research Park. Here, the emphasis is on working alongside academic and research teams to explore financial technology applications, experiment with new ideas, and translate them into enterprise use cases over time.

What these examples highlight is a different function of the ecosystem.

If startups bring speed into the system, academia brings direction.

If startup partnerships represent one layer of the ecosystem, and academia another, what begins to emerge is a broader pattern.

GCCs are no longer operating at the edge of the organization. They are increasingly positioned at the intersection of multiple capability streams — internal engineering, external innovation, and future talent pipelines.

That changes their role in a fundamental way as they are no longer just places where capability is built. They are becoming places where capability is assembled — integrated across systems, domains, and partners, rather than owned end-to-end within a single organization.

This shift is easy to overlook, but its implications are significant. For European enterprises, it reflects a set of structural realities that are becoming harder to ignore:

In that context, the question becomes not where we build capability, but how we connect it - across the enterprise and beyond?

This is where the GCC evolves again. Not away from its original role, but beyond it.

From:

To something more nuanced- an orchestration layer. A place where internal teams and external ecosystems intersect. Where ideas move from research to product, from startup to system. And where innovation is accelerated not by scale alone, but by connection.

The competitive advantage, then, is no longer defined by how much capability an organization builds internally. It is defined by how effectively it can connect, integrate, and scale capability across an ecosystem.

And increasingly, GCCs are becoming the point where that integration happens.

Sources: Zinnov

If you want to explore more on this topic or have questions, please reach out to the author via LinkedIn.

Disclaimer: Any use of the data or graphics require prior approval from Zinnov.

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