Can India take on Silicon Valley as a global R&D hub?

May be in a zillion years.

These R&D centers still depend on hired resources. People who sell their time and services for a salary. But as I understand it, Valley's big portion of success is in its startups and their founders. People who take risk to create wealth and jobs. They themselves may not have all the required skills to succeed. But they hire others to fill that gap. They take that risk as part of their entrepreneurship. This is what is missing in the R&D centers in India. There are a lot of bright people working for others. But not for themselves. This will change in future. But we are not there yet.

My hunch is its going to take a lot more than 5 years.

I've worked for start-ups in Silicon Valley and for a large Internet company in Bangalore. From what I observed, a large part of the missing element were skills for new product development. The culture of development is rooted in large-scale projects. Large plans. Big budgets. Huge teams. As such, the type of product development skills for the quick-iteration that is needed for startup development isn't typical practice.

About a year back I was contacted by a CEO of an Indian development house who couldn't find enough talent to build social-media applications. He was trying to figure out if he should outsource his projects to San Francisco or Manhattan.