India’s GCC landscape has moved decisively towards higher-value work. PwC reports that India GCCs generated value for their headquarters at a weighted average CAGR of 10–11% during FY20–24 and expects 11–12% during FY25–29. EY’s 2025 GCC survey also found that 87% of participating centers had ownership of end-to-end global processes, while 45% were participating in global decision-making.
The changing innovation gap
For the first generation of GCCs, there was no question. The center was established to execute defined work. The enterprise decided what needed to be done; the GCC supplied the capability. Success was measured through cost, productivity, service levels and scale.
It may identify a problem before the headquarters does. It may develop a
new solution. It may create an algorithm, platform, workflow, product feature, or AI capability. It may build knowledge that becomes difficult to separate from the enterprise's competitive advantage. At that point, the old distinction between execution and innovation starts to break down and that is where many enterprises face an uncomfortable gap.
Innovation has disturbed a neat arrangement
Innovation is rarely a single event. It develops through experimentation, accumulated knowledge, data, engineering capability, and repeated problem-solving. By the time an idea becomes commercially important, contributions may have come from teams in several countries and across several functions.
That makes the question of ownership considerably more complicated than deciding whose name appears on a patent.
A company may legally own an asset while having little clarity about where the capability to develop it resides. It may have a GCC that is critical to a product but still govern the center as a delivery organization. It may expect the center to create new technology while retaining decision-making structures designed for a very different kind of operation.
This is where the language around GCC innovation can become misleading and a more consequential question arises after the idea has been created.
Without answers, innovation can remain trapped in a collection of successful projects.
Existing GCCs face a different version of the same problem
A GCC may now be building products, developing AI capabilities and solving problems for global business units while continuing to be measured largely on delivery. The enterprise wants the center to think like an innovator while governing it like a service provider- creating an inherent contradiction
The solution is not necessarily to transfer ownership of every innovation to the GCC. Nor does every GCC need to become an independent product organization. The requirement here is clarity.
These questions sit at the heart of what could be called the next stage of GCC evolution.
GCC 4.0 is often described through the language of artificial intelligence, digital transformation, advanced skills, and innovation. However, there is a less visible dimension to that evolution: the move from delivering capabilities to creating and governing enterprise value.
So, leaders need to ask what the organization has designed the GCC to do with the innovation it produces.
P.R GLOlinks’ approach to GCC design and transformation
Our starting point is not simply which functions should be established in India. It is the larger question of what the GCC is intended to become within the global enterprise and that means examining the mandate first: what the center should own, what value it is expected to create, and how its responsibilities should evolve.
Technology, workforce, governance, data, and organizational design are considered as parts of the same architecture.
For an existing GCC, the same framework, however, can reveal a different problem: whether its current mandate and governance still reflect the value it is already creating. So our objective is to ensure that the enterprise knows what is being created, where that value resides, who has the authority to develop it further, and how the organization intends to capture it.
The difference between a GCC that creates innovation and a GCC that creates enterprise value is not about how much innovation it produces, but about how deliberately the GCC has been designed to turn innovation into something that it can own, scale, and compound
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