BackEntrepreneurship is here to stay
Emerging companies and start-ups are engaged in offering innovative solutions, boosting growth and creating jobs
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Entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial ecosystem have experienced a profound transformation in the past few decades. Entrepreneurs earlier known for their risk-taking abilities are now being recognized as innovators who aspire big. Emerging companies and start-ups are engaged in offering innovative solutions, boosting growth and creating jobs. This group is focusing on making a global impact with local consequence.
There are three key indicators that demonstrate that this new entrepreneurship culture is here to stay in India and deliver long-term benefits.
Social acceptance of entrepreneurial mindset: Traditionally, the social acceptance of the entrepreneurial mindset is not very high in India. Families want their children to take the safe route of being employed than being an employer. Today, this trend is fast changing. The Gen-Ys are neither scared of taking risks nor failing. They create the freedom of doing what they think is right and adopting the entrepreneurship route. What is heartening for India is that this group comes with high aspirations and are not willing to settle for anything less.
Globally known, locally relevant: The new age entrepreneurs have understood the recipe for success—that is being locally relevant. They are focusing on creating local and unique solutions to solve local problems. This is a very important change compared with earlier days when all the innovation was done for foreign markets. Today, when innovation happens, it is relevant to India and at the same time the solution is customized to a remote place in Africa. This will help get the local acceptance of the solution and makes the enterprise more relevant.
Channelize energies: Entrepreneurship is not an activity that can be sustained by one person. Though it starts with one or few people taking the lead, it needs the entire ecosystem to make the revolution stay here.
Visibility, being a great part of any successful venture, the media can help a great deal in unearthing various entrepreneurial initiatives being taken and spread the news around the world. This motivates the entrepreneurs and also helps promote their solutions to a wider audience.
Most of the new age ventures will be idea-oriented and cash strapped, hence media support for societal cause will help the budding entrepreneurs.
The curiosity and courage for entrepreneurship should start from academics. The curriculum should encourage an entrepreneurial mindset to ensure that each individual is not constrained by the ability to think and has the courage to face failures.
There is no other place than a corporate to incubate the new thinking and lend a helping hand for the budding entrepreneurs to validate their ideas. Corporates should allocate certain funds to identify and help the entrepreneurs create proof of concepts of their products. The corporate validation will help the products and services get more acceptance when they hit the market.
Another important institution that can ensure the trend will explode is the government. In addition to providing the incubation infrastructure, the government can pass on certain tax breaks to entrepreneurs and enterprises until they reach critical mass. The government can make the entire company launch process a memorable and simple exercise for the budding entrepreneurs, who can focus more on innovation than worrying about taxes and regulations.
Industry bodies such as Nasscom should take the lead role in fostering the entrepreneurial culture. Nasscom with its 10,000 Start-ups initiative aims at incubating, enabling funding and supporting 10,000 technology start-ups in India over the next 10 years.
The programme over the last 10 months has significantly scaled up the start-up ecosystem in the country through multifold activities aimed at fostering entrepreneurship and providing robust early-stage support. It is an initiative to jump-start the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem through incubation, mentorship and angel funding. The vision also being to create a fivefold increase in start-up jobs, Nasscom will evangelize and create awareness about technology entrepreneurship as a preferred career option.
The technology landscape has been pivotal in facilitating the entrepreneurial capabilities of start-ups. India’s start-up community is aiming to transform the technology landscape by building niche products and services, and tapping non-core markets. Their contribution in the information technology industry has been critical as they are bringing in a plethora of opportunities to facilitate economic growth. Entrepreneurship is a trend which is here to stay and thrive.
K.K. Natarajan is chairman of Nasscom and chief executive officer of Mindtree Technologies Ltd.
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