Apparently bigwigs are beginning to realize the value of stacking their teams with social scientists and not just technically-minded engineers.

To effectively carry out their global R&D 2.0 strategy, CEOs of multinationals must give themselves a target of staffing at least 40% of their R&D labs in emerging markets with sociologists and micro-economists by 2015. To promptly achieve this goal, MNCs need to cast their recruitment net a bit wider. In India, for example, in addition to hiring the cream of engineering students from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), MNCs’ local HR directors should also recruit bright graduates from reputed social sciences institutions like Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi.

Goldman Sachs predicts that the bulk of the global economic growth over the next three decades will occur in emerging markets like India, China, and Brazil. But multinationals can’t capture this explosive growth unless they first upgrade their technically-skewed innovation model to a multidisciplinary R&D approach.

via R&D 2.0: Fewer Engineers, More Anthropologists – Navi Radjou – HarvardBusiness.org.