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Category: Technology

  • India’s Rapidly Evolving Technology Landscape

    Most investors who have put capital behind consumer internet startups trying to build commoditised businesses will lose money.

    India’s technology landscape can be characterized as having seen three waves of evolution and growth. The first wave was led by the likes of Tata Consultancy Services, Patni Computer Systems, Infosys and Wipro, who pioneered the outsourcing model based on labour cost arbitrage. These were firms founded in pre-liberalization India and took decades to establish themselves as global brands. The second wave occurred in post-liberalization India of the 1990s, when several IT firms adopted similar business models to the outsourcing pioneers. The small- and mid-sized enterprises that emerged during this period strengthened the foundation of India’s nascent software services industry and today form the backbone of that thriving sector. The third wave can be said to have begun with the advent of the Internet – startups such as Naukri.com, MakeMyTrip.com, InMobi and Flipkart.com who have emerged as category leaders in providing web services.

    The common thread to the three waves has been the domination of the services-oriented software and Internet companies, and in recent years, the preponderance of ideas that have worked in the West that were repackaged to suit the Indian context. The fact is India has seen more imitation than genuine product innovation.

    India’s technology industry has been dominated by IT and Internet firms, and venture capital investment figures for recent years bear out this trend. Since 2009, VCs have poured over $810 million into 113 deals in the software, mobile and Internet sectors. In contrast, early-stage health care and clean technology companies have received $292 million across 71 deals. It’s also interesting that average deal sizes are larger for early-stage companies in software and Internet than for health care and clean technology – one would have thought that the former is less capital intensive than the latter, and would hence require lesser capital to grow at the early-stage. By some estimates, India’s software and Internet ventures have been raising larger amounts of early-stage venture funding than American clean technology startups.

    The data points to a clear mismatch both in terms of funding size and sectoral capital allocation. My hunch is that most investors who have put capital behind consumer Internet startups trying to build commoditized businesses will lose money. Most of these ventures are pursuing unsustainable business models. As if having imitators of American Internet startups wasn’t enough, we’ve seen imitators of Indian imitators of US Internet startups successfully raise funding. These ventures have almost no pricing power and hence almost no profitability. A fund raising arms race is under way, and the vast majority of startups will lose out as capital providers cluster around the top 1 or 2 category leaders.

    In a more rational world, India’s VCs would bring together some of the outstanding engineers and scientists working at corporate research laboratories operated by Fortune 500 giants like General Electric, who are conducting key R&D work that is in many cases indispensable to the parent company. VCs should be willing to back stellar teams pursuing big ideas, and should invest capital in ways that harnesses the economics of outsourcing to deliver path-breaking innovation.

    The data also tells us that more India-focused venture funds will be forced to look in places other than the tried and familiar Internet and IT sectors. Health care, clean technology and energy are mammoth markets that are relatively underserved and in dire need of early-stage capital, particularly for areas with substantial technology risk. Investors are beginning to recognize this, and several new funds have emerged that are both willing to look beyond IT and are comfortable backing early-stage ventures with $1-2 million.

    The emergence of product-driven companies in sectors such as life sciences and clean technology in this decade will mark the fourth wave of the evolution and growth of India’s technology landscape. India’s talent base extends far beyond computer science and IT into fundamental sciences and engineering – it’s only a matter of time before risk capital connects with this talent base to deliver world-leading product innovation across more sectors. In order to achieve outsized returns, investors should skate to where the puck is going, rather than where it has been, to quote ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky.

    Originally Published: http://navam.in/1iL99U1

  • The Global Innovation Challenge

    Rising unemployment and income disparity has shaken democracies across the Western world in the last year. Unemployment among young people in particular has been persistent and pervasive — the United States saw the highest ever youth unemployment in 2011, and it has reached as high as 45 percent in Spain. Job creation has suffered not just because of excessive debt. Advanced economies have seen a massive erosion in manufacturing, and new enterprises have been too focused on driving consumption.

    Internet companies have mushroomed in Silicon Valley thanks to the low cost and ease of building products for the Web. They’re able to scale globally while maintaining a relatively low employee headcount. The year 2011 was a landmark one for Internet companies, with several start-ups going public and raising over $3.5 billion in the best year for initial public offerings since 2000. Among the biggest ones to do so in the United States were LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and Renren, a Chinese social networking site. And Facebook’s recent filing for a $5 billion public offering could make 2012 the best year for Internet I.P.O.’s since the dot-com days of 1999.

    But all these companies thrive on aiding consumption, whether it’s through gaming, social networking or group discount buying.

    In contrast, production-oriented technology sectors in health care, advanced materials and energy have had limited success in America. Most ventures in clean technology have absorbed large amounts of capital and have yet to show returns for investors. Many that have managed to grow, like A123 Systems, which manufactures advanced lithium-ion batteries, and Tesla Motors, aren’t very profitable. The success of consumption-driven Internet start-ups has left production-oriented ventures behind.

    It’s technology that ensures equitable growth. Think of how mobile phones are ubiquitous across the developing world: there are over five billion cellphone users worldwide. Would it have been possible for all of them to have landline telephones instead? Would there be enough copper in the world to draw wiring to even the poorest day-wage laborers in India and China who today use cellphones? Even if the world had enough copper, could it all be mined quickly enough with limited environmental impact, and could it be devoted to laying telephone lines for a customer of meager means? Almost every modern day convenience that the West takes for granted will have to be re-engineered to make it cheaper and better for large-scale use in the developing world.

    There’s a dichotomy here. The advanced Western economies aren’t able to create jobs partly because of their inability to compete with Asia when it comes to large-scale manufacturing, and this has in turn limited their ability to scale production-oriented technology companies. In the East, the emergence of manufacturing — and in India’s case, I.T.-outsourcing — has created higher incomes, a stronger consumer culture and the need for energy and resource efficiency. Rapid urbanization and industrialization in the developing world are irreversible trends. There are suddenly billions of consumers in Asia who can now aspire to the standard of living in advanced economies, and meeting this demand will require a giant leap of innovation across sectors like energy, chemicals, health care, transportation, water and materials.

    But emerging markets lag in innovation because their entrepreneurship ecosystem, higher education institutions and research infrastructure are far less robust. Above all, entrepreneurship is celebrated in American culture and business failures aren’t looked down upon. Silicon Valley is the product of this culture — like French cuisine and Indian classical music, it cannot be cloned. As the world’s innovation engine, Silicon Valley should lead the way in commercializing game-changing technologies that can ease constraints on the world’s resources and enhance production. Instead, it has found more success in ventures for the consumer market.

    But start-ups must be close to their customers, and there’s a case to be made that industrial and clean-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley have been hard-pressed for success because their real customers are in emerging markets. From an economic standpoint, climate change and resource efficiency are more the problems of developing nations. Moreover, as the bankruptcy of American clean-energy start-ups like Solyndra has shown, innovation that needs to be propped up by governments is difficult to sustain.

    Similarly, consumer Internet ventures in emerging markets are only able to clumsily copy ideas from abroad. Though there is a rapidly growing middle class with Internet access in India and China, the United States still has the world’s largest and most affluent consumer base, making it a natural pioneer for consumer Internet innovation.

    The Internet is challenging the hegemony of nations. An Internet start-up in any country can reach consumers worldwide because of the platform’s openness. But the same isn’t true for production-focused start-ups. Greater economic integration and free trade will help them globalize more easily. To foster innovation in production-oriented sectors, nations need to champion the freer flow of technology, labor and capital and create institutions and laws that promote the same openness. There needs to be a symbiosis between entrepreneurial talent, investment capital and sectors that are in need of transformational innovation. Only then will global economic growth be truly inclusive and harmonious.

    Originally Published: The New York Times International Weekly

  • A Technological Solution For Climate Change

    Harsh and I have co-authored a piece on technology as the solution to climate change:

    Incremental technological advances are already getting us smarter flats, more efficient cars, cleaner natural gas, yield-enhancing genetically modified seeds. We need technology and markets rather than summits and accords at Kyoto or Durban. Innovation is the key here, not artificially slowing conventional energy production.

    More here.

     

  • Anyone Can Build

    In 1997, Apple, pioneer of the computing industry, was floundering. It turned to its co-founder, Steve Jobs for direction and impetus, and the rest, as they say is history.

    Jobs took the company back to its roots in innovation, building tools that help people change the world.

    Jobs was instrumental in championing the vision of the personal computer when computers were considered useful only for governments and large businesses. Not only did he succeed in realizing his vision back then through the Apple II, Jobs went on to define the post-PC era with the introduction of mobile computing devices. Apple’s revival post-1997 is an amazing and insanely great story, to borrow some of the words that he frequently used to describe his company’s products.

    Over three decades, Jobs transformed several multi-billion dollar industries on a global scale through his work at Apple and Pixar Animation Studios. But Steve Jobs will not just go down in history as one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time.

    The message of his life is deeper. In Pixar’s 2007 animation film Ratatouille, Chef Gusteau used to say that anyone can cook. Gusteau was a renowned chef in Paris who invited much derision from others in his community for believing that anybody could become a great cook.

    Steve Jobs showed that anyone can build. With passion, focus and a commitment to innovate, entrepreneurs can beat the odds and build great companies. There’s tons to learn from Steve Jobs’s work for anybody trying to solve technological problems in a business context – in this sense, Jobs is a Dronacharya to countless entrepreneurs worldwide.

    Silicon Valley has seen dozens of luminaries come and go over the decades, but the name and work of Steve Jobs shines the brightest in this august gallery of the crazy ones. The man has left us – but his legend will live on for centuries to come.

     

  • India Learns To Innovate

    India is regarded as the world’s outsourcing center and a production powerhouse for generic drugs. Information technology and pharmaceutical companies have lent the India story a rich layer thanks to their reputations for efficiency. Aside from creating hundreds of thousands of jobs at home, these industries have helped train a domestic labor force that suffers at the hands of a broken higher-education system. Above all, Indians who have worked at these companies have been filled with a confidence to strike out on their own, and the seeds of cutting-edge innovation are now taking root in the Indian economy.

    For a long time, India’s economy was starved for capital. Its best scientific talent went abroad because there were no opportunities at home. Monopolistic companies found their products to be in permanent demand because of artificial shortages created by government policy, so they never felt the need to invest in innovation. But business realities have changed dramatically over the last decade as India transforms into an urbanized, industrial economy. An increasingly discerning consumer base and competition in the marketplace are forcing companies to innovate for the home market. One example is Tata Motors, the builder of the $2,500 Nano car, which changed automobile design fundamentally and invented new ways for automobile manufacturing. Nano factories use “smart” technologies and automation to manage supply chains in real-time and minimize the consumption of energy and resources during production.

    Economic turmoil in developed nations and stringent immigration policies have made the prospect of returning home more attractive for expatriate Indians. Vivek Wadhwa, who researches innovation, showed that more than 60 percent of the returnees to India cited better economic opportunities as a key reason for making the shift. These individuals bring with them not just experience and skills, but a culture and professional network that is catalyzing innovation in India. Indeed, moving up the value chain this way is imperative for the economy to maintain its growth momentum and create jobs.

    Seeing the quality of people flocking to India, global investors have eagerly set up shop. India has never seen the availability of so much financial risk capital — yet it isn’t enough, and it is spread rather unevenly. Many investors believe that India is still limited when it comes to product innovation and are hesitant to back innovation-driven ventures. Instead, they choose to play it safe by focusing on outsourcing-oriented businesses, a formula that has been known to work well.

    As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist in India, I see that my nation is at a tipping point. India has always failed to achieve its potential when it comes to commercializing technology, but with the return of talent from abroad and the emergence of a large domestic market, it now has momentum.

    I have found that companies that create knowledge and commercialize scientific research can attract engineers and scientists from across the globe. Two companies that I’ve invested in include founders who used to be expatriates.

    India can be a chaotic and difficult place to do business, consistently getting a low ranking in the World Bank’s reports on the ease of doing business. Opening bank accounts or working with the government’s tax and regulatory agencies entail mounds of paperwork and can drag on for weeks. Still, it makes sense to invest in innovation because of India’s superior capital efficiency, which mitigates financial risks. Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, an economist, has shown in his book “The Rise of India” that India requires four units of capital to generate one unit of output, while China consumes five units of capital to produce one unit of output.

    There are lessons here for policymakers as well — competition for talent and capital is now global. Nations that champion openness and freedom will be able to compete and prosper, while those that remain insular will fall behind. A lot remains to be done to cultivate such an environment in India. Outdated labor laws constrain the development of manufacturing, and the higher-education system needs large investments for expansion along with a boost in autonomy.

    India has rapidly moved on from its rigidly socialist past, setting the stage for more openness and freedom. An older colleague in his sixties remarked to me that my generation of Indians was fortunate to be able to build companies from the ground up. In earlier times, India’s economy remained so tightly controlled by the government that this would have simply been impossible. The government can encourage entrepreneurship by making it easier to run businesses, enhancing access to finance and building transportation infrastructure and new cities.

    India doesn’t have to be just the world’s back office. It can also be the innovation engine.

    Originally Published: The New York Times International Weekly

  • Our Nation As A Startup

    Doing business in India can be overwhelming for somebody accustomed to working in a more hospitable business environment. The World Bank’s Doing Business study ranks India 134th worldwide for ease of doing business, behind lesser-talked- about nations such as Tanzania and Ghana.

    Besides the well-documented inadequacy of physical infrastructure, archaic corporate and taxation laws are yet to catch up with modern ways of structuring and operating new ventures. Yet India is able to register high rates of economic growth year after year.

    U.S. President Barack Obama’s contention that India has already arrived is magnanimous — India is a startup with high potential but hasn’t made it yet into the pantheon of world powers. Like a startup, India is chaotic and unpredictable.

    Democracy adds another twist in the tale. As the last three months have shown, Indian politics can turn on a dime and the perception of political stability can give way very quickly. India’s business model is contrary to how other Asian economies have developed: India continues to be services-driven and domestically-oriented instead of being heavy on export-led manufacturing.

    This approach shielded the economy during the financial crisis. With growth driven by high-quality entrepreneurs who have been able to deliver despite a suspicious and often obstructionist state, it’s no wonder that investors continue to be bullish on India and tend to overlook major political and geopolitical risks.

    But high growth brings with it many quandaries. Though a happy problem to have, a growing enterprise faces its own management challenges. At the very least, the capacity of India’s executives and government to manage growth has been somewhat disappointing. India chose (some would argue that it stumbled upon) a bottom-up development model based upon entrepreneurship.

    We are now reaching a stage in the economic cycle where we need to push the envelop further, not negate the strategy that has served us very well over the last two decades. India saw two bursts of significant reform, from 1991 to 1996 under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and again from 1998 to 2004 under Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee. Since 2004, there has been virtually no reform initiated by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government in areas such as labor law, where the current regime is constraining growth in manufacturing. This is impairing the quality of India’s economic growth and limiting job creation.

    Recently, Steve Jobs said that his company, Apple, is the world’s largest startup. It’s an interesting view given that Apple’s market capitalization, which is close to $300 billion, makes it one of the most valuable companies in the world. Apple also has zero debt and tens of billions of dollars in cash. From the brink of bankruptcy and irrelevance in 1998, Apple’s financial and competitive strength is now the envy of the technology industry.

    When Mr. Jobs returned as Apple’s CEO, he had a straightforward mantra: To rebuild Apple as a pioneering innovator and rescue it from the morass of creating “me-too” products, as he put it. He felt that the company he founded had forgotten what it stood for. This was audacious for a company struggling to stay on its feet.

    Indian administrators and policy-makers should also remember how high rates of economic growth have been achieved in the first place. Like a startup which has achieved a fit between product and market fit and is ready to scale up, India needs to continue providing its entrepreneurs with the space and environment to operate.

    Apple lost its mojo because it abandoned the strategy that made it what it was. Curiously, that strategy itself was not rigid and inflexible but one of continuous innovation, where Apple would make its products irrelevant before its competitors could. A return to this thinking has ensured the company’s rise through the 2000s. India, too, needs to return to policies that have transformed its economy from anemic to blistering growth.

    In Hindu philosophy, The Upanishads talk of the concept of “Atmanam Viddhi,” which roughly translates as “knowing oneself.” It turns out that self-knowledge is also a sound business strategy — to reach where you want to go, it’s first important to know how you got to where you are.

    The government must realize what it is that has delivered high rates of economic growth. Negating the ideas and policies that are driving India’s economic development by delaying the next round of economic reforms could prove to be immensely damaging to India’s economic prospects. India needs a visionary leader to step up and push through some of the changes that most agree need to be implemented — but few have the political courage to execute — or else an opportunity may be lost again.

    Originally Published:  http://navam.in/1m5k6AE

  • Reinventing The Wheel For India

    AFP/Getty Images
    India currently has just one automotive company, Tata Motors, in the global top 20, while China has three in the top 20.

    The transportation sector in India is witnessing rapid growth as India urbanizes and the economy continues to expand. Car sales for July recorded a jump of 38% from a year earlier, rising to an all-time high. Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and Kolkata are all building up mass-transit systems. The national capital has just opened a swanky new airport terminal and the civil aviation industry has never been more competitive.

    Consumers today have lots of choices in how they choose to get around. This is a far cry from the earlier times when government carriers dominated the skies and entry into the automotive industry was heavily regulated and just a handful of players allowed to manufacture cars. With the exception of railways, which continue to be a government monopoly, every sector of transportation is witnessing a vibrancy never seen before in India.

    The upward shift in the standard and quality of transportation in India is one of the most visible and tangible benefits bestowed by economic growth. The problem – and investment opportunity – is that we have only scratched the surface.

    India currently has just one automotive company, Tata Motors, in the global top 20, while China has three in the top 20 and ten in the top 30. Interestingly, many of China’s large automotive firms are home-grown, while international auto companies like Suzuki, Honda and Hyundai dominate the Indian market.

    Vast regions of the country are yet to be connected by roads and airports. Conventional approaches and legacy technology cannot meet all the new demand. The 300 millionth car to be sold in India may not even run on petrol or diesel. There is a need for innovation to ensure that transportation capacity scales in step with mushrooming demand in every sector, be it aviation, passenger cars, commercial vehicles or mass transit.

    Relying only on technologies and ideas from the West is not feasible, since there has never been a transportation need of this scale in the developed economies. Indian policy-makers and entrepreneurs must think for themselves.

    Investing in auto startups and building companies in the transportation sector is certainly not for the fainthearted. Building an auto company from scratch is extremely difficult. Most investors would balk at the idea of funding a car company, given the capital investment required to manufacture cars. But it is all but impossible for an entrepreneur to start up without financing.

    Tesla Motors, the electric car company funded by leading Silicon Valley VC firms and built by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk went public recently in the first IPO by a US-based automotive company since Ford Motor Co. in 1956. Mr. Musk staked his considerable personal wealth behind the venture, using his own money when institutional funding was difficult to obtain. Without Musk’s calculated gamble, Tesla wouldn’t have survived.

    There are other ways of entering the industry. I met Dilip Chhabria, the founder of automotive design firm DC Design, at an event organized by IIM Calcutta last week and he said the time was right for investors to form a consortium to acquire the rights to rebuild and redesign the Ambassador, an iconic car produced by Hindustan Motors, the one-time market leader that is now struggling financially.

    One should remember that while the precedents which are the basis of the negativity about automotive startups are from abroad, the Indian context and market represent a new dynamic – and that can make all the difference. The structural factors driving the growth of India’s automotive market are not going away anytime soon. Rather than facing a headwind, there will be a tailwind assisting those venturing into the Indian automotive industry.

    While this doesn’t imply that any automotive startup will do well, high capital requirements should not be a deterrent to investing in the opportunity presented by the Indian auto sector at this stage of India’s growth cycle.

    Originally Published: http://navam.in/TcuDmV

  • Build Your Dreams

    That’s not the cheesy title of this blog’s first post — it’s a leading electric car company in China that is blazing a trail in the automotive industry.

    Founded in 1995, BYD Company started as a manufacturer of batteries, competing against established Japanese firms to become the world’s leading manufacturer of rechargeable batteries by 2000.

    It entered the automobile industry via an acquisition in 2002, with zero experience in the car business. In 2008, Warren Buffett invested $230 million for a 10% stake in the company and BYD launched the world’s first plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, successfully integrating forward from just manufacturing batteries to producing battery-powered cars.

     BYD has been consistently rated among the most innovative companies in the world, beating entrenched automobile industry heavyweights such as Ford and Volkswagen.

     BYD’s story doesn’t just represent the rise of a new innovator — it is symbolic of a surge in technology-driven, product companies from Asia. BYD has broken the stereotype of the Chinese mass manufacturer, one capable only of churning out commoditized products at low cost.

    From focusing on only outsourcing and mass manufacturing of commodity products, nations like India and China will now produce more innovation-driven companies driven by the three-way confluence of the availability of high-quality technical talent, a large domestic market and broader shift in the economic center of gravity from West to East. This is a strong, secular and structural trend whose momentum will be a key driver of the next wave of economic growth.

    There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur — and as BYD has shown, build one’s dream.

    Originally Published: http://navam.in/1p66B7T

  • The Jugaad Myth

    In 2001, Fevicol ran an advertising campaign showing a truck overloaded with people making its way across a rough and barren landscape. Even though the terrain is rocky and the truck overflowing, none of the passengers fall off, bonded together, viewers are to think, with the same strength and reliability as India’s leading adhesive brand.

    The campaign was a hit, winning the prestigious Cannes Lion for the advertising firm which conceptualised it. It deserves full marks for creativity and for capturing poignantly how Indians get by and get on with life despite seemingly insurmountable hardships, a classic example of art imitating life.

    This phenomenon, where people in India seem to always find a way to muddle along somehow or the other, has slowly entered management-speak as jugaad, a curiously Indian way of getting things done. Venture capitalists and management gurus have praised this approach of doing more with less, but jugaad is more an outcome of limited access to capital, resources and infrastructure, than it is innovation.

    Peter Drucker, doyen of management studies, defined innovation as “the specific instrument of entrepreneurship that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.” Take the case of the humble earthen pot, which has been used since time immemorial to keep drinking water cool in some of the hottest regions of the Indian hinterland. Is the earthen pot an innovation in the modern sense, or does it reflect the brazen poverty and under-developed economies of its end-users?

    The pot is certainly an innovation insofar as it allows water to be cooled even in very high temperatures, but it is also used by those who cannot afford or access modern technology such as refrigerators. Higher-income homes do not rely on earthen pots.

    Innovating for bottom of the pyramid should not degenerate into a paternalistic condescension of creating low-quality products that have poor usability. Many innovations which claim to be for the bottom of the pyramid would want their purveyors to be stuck at the bottom, for if they managed to increase their income levels, they’d choose more technologically-advanced solutions which actually boost productivity and create wealth.

    An inexpensive refrigerator that delivers effective cooling at a low operating cost would be more of an innovation, allowing more people to use refrigeration the way the Nano automobile from Tata Motors has made cars accessible to a broader section of society. Tata Motors’ Nano plant at Sanand, Gujarat uses automated manufacturing, cutting-edge supply-chain management and robotics to produce the world’s cheapest four-wheeler.

    Tata has re-invented several aspects of automobile engineering when designing the Nano, and the company has broken the stereotype of India being only a competent outsourcer. Even though the Nano is a product targeted at the aspirational bottom of the pyramid, it is built to meet global standards of safety and performance at a world-class factory.

    A nation’s innovation ability is tied closely to its research capacity in science and engineering, which is a function of the higher-education system. The government has a role to play in investing in fundamental science research areas where it would take very long for private capital to get a return on investment.

    According to India’s Department of Science and Technology, total investment in research and development has languished between 0.85-0.90 percent of GDP since 2000. In contrast, the US invests around 2.6 percent of GDP and China, 1.4 percent, about twice as much as it did in 1995.

    Moreover, Indian private sector investment in R&D has grown substantially since 1998 to contribute over 25 percent of the pie, while government investment has declined. This means that while tax receipts have increased in the period alongside the boom in the economy, the government’s research funding has declined in relative terms and the gap has been bridged by the private sector.

    The substantial growth of the economy has not seen a commensurate increase in the establishment of more science and engineering universities and government R&D investment. Instead, we have seen a rationing of existing supply, with increased reservation of seats at the IITs and other centrally-funded universities—policies that can compromise quality. India should be focusing on increasing capacity to such an extent that everyone has opportunity and nobody is left behind.

    However, increasing capacity does not mean building a campus and naming it Indian Institute of Technology. Institutions are not just mere buildings and infrastructure, they are nurtured by people, and it takes decades of relentless focus on excellence for an institution to achieve a reputation. Political opportunism and promises of an IIT for every state are destroying a brand built over five decades. Dr C N R Rao, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Science Advisory Council, has severely criticised the government’s policy. In a nation the size of India, should there be just one world-class university brand?

    Earthen pots and other types of jugaad may make good documentary film subjects, but we should remember that these are typically low productivity solutions with a below-par user experience. They should not be romanticised. India cannot become a world-beating economic force by under-investing in fundamental scientific research and celebrating the stop-gap survival mechanisms as path-breaking innovation. Such celebration and characterisation should be left to advertising agencies and other creative types looking for a story to tell. The state should commit itself to turning India into a magnet for top scientific talent from around the world, increasing investment in fundamental science and engineering and creating infrastructure which will give Indian scientists the choice of working in their home country instead of moving to more hospitable climes abroad.

    When such an environment is created, storytellers will find inspiration from life to imagine and create more on the lines of the recent Hollywood blockbuster series on high-technology superhero Iron Man, showcasing cutting-edge technology that can inspire real innovators.

    Originally Published: http://navam.in/2qdx2Pw