Axilor, now a year old in Bangalore, is dedicated to translating ideas into enterprise, fast. Of course, the world seems awash in ideas. Whether you access your information individually glued to your mobility device or tête-à-tête with like-minded souls, or consume it through video, audio or old-fashioned text, the challenge…
I spent a few days this week shuttling between Bangalore and Delhi, and am writing this reflection on the very important topic of intellectual property as I saw it being discussed in the hubs of entrepreneurship and policymaking. In Bangalore, there was the entrepreneur’s lament, mine and that of others,…
My earlier two posts (here and here) introduced the work of our Expert Committee on Entrepreneurship and Innovation, especially our Pyramidal model that is a guide to short- and longer-term actions to creativity and (job) creation. Here, I’ll discuss how to upgrade the network of incubators that have sprung up across the country, as…
In the previous post, I shared an overview of recommendations made by the Expert Committee on Entrepreneurship and Innovation at NITI Aayog. In this post, I highlight two key short-term recommendations we have made: competitions to solve particular problems, and perhaps using the resulting buzz to seed a national movement to…
The Indian government, in the budget speech early in 2015, authorized the Atal Innovation Mission, including a corpus of funds set aside to help promote entrepreneurship and innovation in India. Out of that grew the work of a committee I had the privilege of chairing in New Delhi, the Expert…
A luminary in Bangalore recently asked me how I could summarize what I had learned from two decades or so of studying entrepreneurship in developing countries and, lately, diving into it myself. My answer: It’s in every entrepreneur’s self-interest to be public-spirited and invest in his or her surroundings. I…
Here’s an op-ed titled ‘Fail and pass: Why Modi must take a cue from Li’s rhetoric‘ published by The Indian Express. That India should not be afraid might seem an odd thing to say at a time when Indians are brimming with confidence. After all, it is the only one of the…
On this Independence Day in India, I watched PM Modi’s address to the Nation in Delhi. The oration was spirited, as is normal with this PM, and the message reassuringly positive. Of course, the jury is out until there are results, but in the meantime, I want to highlight the…
The passing of the 11th President of India, APJ Abdul Kalam, has triggered an outpouring of affection. The so-called “missile man,” named after his former career as a scientist and researcher involved with India’s space and missile programs, was popularly also called the People’s President. This outpouring prompted me to…
This post is part of my Thinking Like an Entrepreneur Series, where I attempt to distil my personal experiences for would-be entrepreneurs. In the world cup football finals (soccer to my American friends) in Rio de Janeiro last summer, I witnessed the surgical precision with which the German team defeated the…