Corporate nationality has become the operative variable determining whether a multinational can access new knowledge, innovate and build competitive advantage, argues Srividya Jandhyala in a Business Times opinion column published Saturday, Oct 18, 2025. When national security considerations run high, she writes, the defining question for a company's innovation output is blunt: "Where are you from?"

The column, part of the paper's "The Broad View" series, lays out a structural argument rather than a dataset: governments, regulators and other stakeholders now calibrate their treatment of foreign firms according to the perceived geopolitical alignment of the firm's home country. The core concern driving this behavior, Jandhyala writes, is that resources feeding a global company's innovation efforts — and the innovation itself — could be exploited by that company's home country to gain advantage in geopolitical competition. Firms headquartered in perceived rival states therefore face challenges and hostilities when they attempt to run global innovation programs.

For R&D managers, the column's most consequential claim concerns inputs. If access to knowledge, talent, partners and markets now conditions on corporate nationality, then the siting decisions, collaboration structures and partner selection that once optimized purely for scientific or cost reasons carry political risk that portfolio planning has to price in. Jandhyala does not offer case studies, deal figures or sample sizes to quantify the effect — the piece is analytical, and readers should treat its causal claims as a framework to test against their own pipeline data rather than measured results.

The column names the mechanism: techno-nationalism. Jandhyala defines it broadly as the retention of a domestic technological edge in sectors deemed key to national security. In those sectors, she writes, the central worry for governments is twofold — that foreign firms will undermine domestic innovation efforts, or that they will gain a relative advantage from operating inside the domestic system. The implication for corporate R&D planning is direct: in security-adjacent fields, foreign-origin firms should expect tighter scrutiny of research partnerships, data access and technology transfer, and should model approval timelines and compliance costs accordingly.

Two collateral effects deserve attention from research leaders. First, Jandhyala points to a decline in scientific collaboration across countries — a trend she cites as context, though the column provides no figures, bibliometric evidence or time window to substantiate it. Second, she flags the growing divergence in technical standards as an additional drag on global companies' innovation efforts. Standards fragmentation is a cost line as much as a strategic one: divergent specifications can force parallel product development tracks, duplicate validation work and separate supplier ecosystems by region, all of which compress R&D productivity for firms that previously built to a single global standard.

The column's argument compresses to a portfolio thesis. Firms need a new strategy to operate in a world where corporate nationality impacts competition, Jandhyala writes in her standfirst — innovation is now a battlefield of geopolitical tensions, not just of markets and technologies. That reframing shifts the unit of analysis for innovation strategy from the firm and its ecosystem to the firm and its passport.

What the piece does not do is quantify. There are no adoption rates, no patent-flow statistics, no sector breakdowns separating, say, semiconductors from biotech in their exposure to techno-nationalist policy. Decision-makers reading it should pair the framework with their own exposure mapping: which programs depend on cross-border knowledge flows, which sit in security-designated sectors, and which face duplicative engineering costs under divergent standards.

Jandhyala concludes on the strategic imperative itself — that companies operating globally must now build innovation strategies which assume nationality-based treatment, rather than treating geopolitical friction as an exception to be managed case by case.