Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), a Maharatna enterprise, has recorded nearly 14 percent growth in its intellectual capital in 2016-17 fiscal. During the year, a record 508 patents and copyrights were filed by the company, translating into filing of nearly two patents/copyrights every working day.

 

With this, the enterprise’s intellectual capital has gone up to 3,915 patents and copyrights filed, which are in productive use in the company’s business. During this period, BHEL invested Rs 794 crore on R&D initiatives, which was 2.75 percent of its turnover. 

 

Significantly, with its innovation-led growth strategy, the enterprise continues to rank among the highest R&D spenders in the country in the engineering and manufacturing segment.

 

Commercialisation of products and systems developed by way of in-house research and development contributed around 21 percent to the company’s total turnover of Rs 28,840 crore in 2016-17.

 

R&D efforts of the undertaking are aimed at improving the performance and efficiency of existing products, and developing new products using state-of-the-art technologies and processes. Focus is on the relevance to the needs of the country to remain contemporary both in terms of technology and features vis-à-vis global benchmarks.

 

Notably, BHEL is one of the only four Indian companies and the only Indian Public Sector Enterprise that figured in ‘The Global Innovation 1000’ of Booz & Co., a list of 1,000 publicly-traded companies which are the biggest spenders on R&D in the world. BHEL has also won the coveted CII-Thompson Reuters Innovation Award in the ‘Hi-tech Corporate’ category. The award recognises BHEL’s innovation and entrepreneurship in India based on number of patents and efficiency and impact of innovation as measured by patent citations. In addition, BHEL’s innovativeness was recognised by Forbes that ranked it as the ninth most innovative company globally.