CIT is headed by Dr Markus Braunsperger, Chief Technology Officer at Hero MotoCorp. The centre would carry out entire product development activities starting from market study and ends at prototype testing.
We visited Hero MotoCorp’s (HMCL’s) state of the art R&D centre at Kukas, near Jaipur in Rajasthan, and came back impressed with level of integration and deployment of latest cutting edge technologies. Centre of Innovation and Technology (CIT) is one of its kind fully integrated single location R&D centre in India. It’s an impressive big bang entry into full scale product development activity by HMCL, and bridges the gap vis-a-vis peers wrt infrastructure and helping to reduce product development timeline and cost.
CIT is built over 247 acres of land (vs 3 acres existing R&D unit at Dharuhera), with investment of R8.5 billion (vs planned investments of R4.5 billion at inception in September 2013).
CIT is headed by Dr Markus Braunsperger, Chief Technology Officer at Hero MotoCorp. CIT has a dedicated team, with large part of senior management of CIT comprising of expats (including dedicated Head HR) from global players. Designing is headed Mr Miyo, who had worked with Honda for 37 years before joining HMCL two years ago.
CIT would carry out entire product development activities starting from market study and ends at prototype testing.
It is one of its kind facility housing entire of R&D process under one roof, including self-sufficient facilities for new product design, prototype manufacturing, testing and validation.
Fully integrated CIT will save time, ensure better quality (considering its unique 5 years warranty) and result in cost savings. Entire existing small R&D operations of HMCL would be shifted from Dharuhera plant.