Starting up the Starts Ups

Recently, the co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak took a dig at Indian education system and said that Indians lacks ‘creativity’ factor in them. Contrary to that, India does have good creative talent but the financial risk taking capacity of an Indian is quite low. Hence ideas do not germinate into commercial businesses. And those who have risk taking capacity flee to US!!! That’s because up till now, unlike US, we didn’t have an organised investor community that could fuel entrepreneurship; be it VCs (Venture Capitalists, PEs( Private Equity) investors, Govt. subsidy/aid/equity capital, etc. And the lax IP legislation is another dampening factor. But in the last decade or so we have seen ventures which are funded in an organised manner; like flipkart, grofers, zomato and others. And now it is picking up pace. During India-preneur event at ISBS most of the participants had filed for a patent for their idea and were already pitching to Seed Funders and VCs for funds. At the same time new career opportunities are coming up in the field of design, fashion, media & entertainment, technology, biosciences and more. So watch out the next decade as increasing number of young minds take a plunge into entrepreneurship with their innovative ideas. To increase the no. of entrepreneurial risk takers we need more incubation centres at colleges, micro finance banks, interest free loans, etc. for students and budding entre. At the same time there has to be encouragement from a person’s family and disapproval of social stigma associated with failure if the venture fails. Also let us not ignore the field of Agri which has good potential for entrepreneurship. Be it inventing a hybrid fruit or veggie or a new farming technique…. I believe that in entreaty social, financial and emotional support is needed so that a person can take risk.