Shiv Nadar on R&D and Innovation

The Foundation attributes HCL's large engineering-and-R&D division to Nadar's 'pioneering spirit and belief in engineering and research' — positioning R&D as the engine of HCL's differentiation rather than labour-arbitrage services, the more common Indian IT narrative.

Nadar joined the executive board of the Indian School of Business in 2005 and chaired the board of governors of IIT Kharagpur until 2014, using those positions to push a research-and-curriculum agenda that mirrored the engineering-and-R&D emphasis inside HCL itself.

Nadar told Wharton that HCL wrote Genesis, the first relational database, ahead of Oracle — written from scratch, not derived from IBM's DB-2 or CICS — because the team believed hierarchical databases could not meet emerging client-server architectures; the product was technically ahead of its time and ultimately failed commercially in India.