It’s Now Or Never: What Indian GCCs Need To Become Innovation Powerhouses
Taking Charge: Today, GCCs need to define roadmaps, shape strategies, or take P&L accountability and not just focus on execution.
13 JUNE 2025 / 4 min read
In late 2022, a Fortune 500 consumer goods company quietly transferred full ownership of a digital trade promotion platform to its India-based Global Capability Center (GCC). The mandate was simple: build, launch, and scale across key ASEAN markets. Nine months later, the platform went live, with 30% lower development cost, three weeks ahead of schedule, and several feature adaptations uniquely suited to the local market. None of these innovations had been envisioned at headquarters. They were the product of proximity, autonomy, and ownership.
This is what happens when a GCC stops executing and starts leading.
And yet, such stories remain the exception. Despite employing over 1.5 million highly skilled professionals and managing increasingly complex mandates from AI development to global platform rollouts, most GCCs remain on the margins of strategic decision-making. They build. They optimise. But they rarely lead.
The gap isn’t in capability. It’s in control.
Many global firms celebrate their GCCs in public, yet behind the scenes, those same centers are denied ownership of products, budgets, or market-facing decisions. They are expected to execute against predefined problem statements, meet delivery SLAs (service level agreements), and occasionally participate in innovation sprints but not define roadmaps, shape strategies, or take P&L accountability. This disconnect between intent and institutional design is no longer sustainable.
Innovation today demands distributed decision-making. Product cycles are shorter, AI is accelerating change, and emerging markets are increasingly driving revenue growth. In this environment, keeping capability centers structurally dependent on headquarters doesn’t just slow execution; it stifles innovation. The uncomfortable truth is that many companies have overinvested in what their GCCs can do and underinvested in what they are allowed to own.
The Value GCCs Could Create—If Allowed
The legacy model, where strategic control remains centralised while execution is globalised, was designed for operational efficiency, not speed, experimentation, or responsiveness. And yet, most GCCs still operate within that architecture. Governance, capital allocation, and product direction remain locked at HQ. Cost metrics and delivery timelines dominate KPIs. Teams are rarely empowered to take risks, experiment at scale, or define success on their terms.
This misalignment creates three strategic liabilities.
First, the talent-ownership gap. GCCs today house some of the world’s most competitive engineering, design, and data talent. In India alone, top GCCs regularly attract professionals who could just as easily join high-growth SaaS firms or start their own ventures. But talent without influence disengages. Skilled professionals don’t want to process tickets; they want to solve problems, shape roadmaps, and see the impact of their work in the market. If GCCs don’t offer that, others will.
Second, there is the innovation velocity gap. As decision rights remain centralised, insights gathered at the edge take too long to influence direction. Opportunities are missed, and experimentation gets delayed. When a product fails to resonate with new market segments, companies often fail to ask the harder question: Were the people closest to the market given the chance to lead?
Third, the strategic irrelevance risk. As wage arbitrage erodes and automation advances, GCCs that remain delivery engines will become commoditised. Without a shift toward innovation ownership, they risk being seen as infrastructure—efficient, but not essential.
For Indian GCCs, the risk isn’t just underutilisation—it’s irrelevance. As top professionals gravitate toward high-autonomy roles in startups and product firms, GCCs confined to execution risk losing their innovation edge. Without strategic ownership, they may become efficient but replaceable–celebrated for scale, yet sidelined from strategy. Already, leaders within India’s GCC ecosystem are grappling with a growing disconnect between expectations and empowerment—one that, if unaddressed, could erode both talent loyalty and long-term strategic influence.
Leading firms are starting to break the mould. A top-five global bank gave its Bangalore team full control of an AI risk engine used across international markets. The result: a redesigned model that improved accuracy and accelerated regulatory compliance. A technology major embedded product managers and user researchers in its India GCC, giving them co-equal ownership of roadmap decisions. In both cases, outcomes improved—not because of cost advantages, but because capability met authority.
Rearchitecting GCCs for Innovation Leadership
Our work with global enterprises suggests that unlocking innovation from GCCs requires four deliberate shifts:
Transfer ownership, not just execution. Give GCCs full-stack accountability for select products or platforms—covering problem definition, user research, delivery, and iteration.
Embed GCC leadership in global governance. Involve them in product councils, investment decisions, and transformation programmes—not as advisors, but as co-owners.
Link incentives to outcomes. Move beyond SLA metrics. Track GCC performance against customer impact, time-to-market, IP creation, or adjacent-market success.
Localise innovation capital. Provide ring-fenced budgets that allow GCCs to run pilots, launch internal ventures, or co-create with partners. Capital signals trust, and trust fuels ambition.
The risk of doing nothing is clear: rising attrition, missed opportunities, and centers that quietly slip into irrelevance. But the upside of change is equally clear: faster innovation, deeper market relevance, and globally distributed leadership that reflects where capability truly resides.
We’ve seen this story before. India became a global leader in IT services—efficient, scalable, and trusted—but missed the opportunity to build global products. The result was decades of growth without strategic control. If GCCs don’t evolve now, history will repeat itself. They will be celebrated for delivery but excluded from innovation. The ecosystem will grow but not lead. And a generation of talent will once again be asked to execute someone else’s vision.
This time, we have the capability. We have the context. We have the timing. The only thing missing is the conviction to choose differently—because the future of innovation won’t be written in headquarters boardrooms alone. It will be built, tested, and scaled by those closest to the problem and ready to own the solution.
GCCs are ready. The question is: will enterprises share control, and will GCC leaders demand it?
