Siemens of Germany has 12 per cent of its 30,000 R&D workers in Asia, up from 7 per cent five years ago. These engineers in Asia are changing the way the German giants designs products.

At its corporate technology center in India’s state of Goa, Siemens engineers helped design a low-cost scanner. They  concentrated on the camera at the scanner’s heart and developed a local replacement costing only about $500 to produce, compared with the original’s $2,000. The engineers drew on their experience of India’s price-sensitive market for surveillance cameras. Instead of customized sensor chips, they employed the same inexpensive light conversion technology used in consumer digital cameras, and bolstered the pictures with extra image-processing technology. Image resolution was further improved by switching to a digital interface.

“The new camera is not a cheap copy of a western model,” says Vishnu Swaminathan, head of the embedded hardware system program at Siemens Corporate Technology India. “We redesigned everything from scratch with a view to cutting costs while meeting the specific needs of local doctors.”

Siemens says the new camera will eventually be installed in high-technology X-ray machines for developed markets. Quoted in the Financial Times, Peter Löscher, Siemens chief executive, says: “A good idea or product from, for instance, India can be plugged into a global system of sales and manufacturing. It helps increase a company’s competitiveness not only in emerging markets but also in industrialized countries.”