The Global Entrepreneurship Summit this month, which will see global figures like Ivanka Trump engage with Indian entrepreneurs, is generating a buzz. This event is happening at a time when India is increasingly becoming an entrepreneurship-driven economy that looks towards innovation as the path to the future. Indians across the board have embraced entrepreneurship with enthusiasm and spirit.

Startup Ecosystem in India

The tradition of Indian entrepreneurship is not a new one. Indians abroad have already proved themselves in the number of startups they have helmed not just in Silicon Valley but also in London, Hong Kong and parts of East Africa. Their successes should inspire Indians at home to do the same.

The proliferation of startups within the country means that India has emerged as the world’s third largest startup ecosystem.

Harnessing India’s Demographic Dividend

India’s economy has, of course, transformed itself dramatically since the liberalisation of 1991, when Dr Manmohan Singh famously told Parliament that no power on earth could stop an idea whose time had come.

And that idea was the opening up of the Indian economy, which not only gave us the growth and diversity that allowed us to weather the storms that confronted the global economy after the crisis of 2008 onwards, but which also enabled us to overtake Japan to become the third largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity (in PPP terms).

In Europe the average age is going to be 46 by 2020, in Japan 47, and even in youthful immigrant-fuelled America, it will be 40, but in India the average age will be 29. We will be a young country – 50 percent under 25, and approximately 65 percent under 35 – where fresh school-leavers will be joining a dynamic, competitive, productive, youthful workforce, which could be the engine of the world, primed to take over from China.

https://www.bloombergquint.com/opinion/2017/11/20/beyond-jugaad-how-indian-entrepreneurs-have-changed-the-world

But this demographic dividend will only work in our favour if we can educate and train our young people to seize the opportunities available to them in the 21st century – opportunities that entrepreneurs are creating.

Harnessing young India’s potential and bringing about the social and economic transformation we all hope for will require highly educated and motivated entrepreneurs to provide leadership across all sectors of our economy.

Some will succeed, and a number will fail, but they will all energise our economic spaces and help cultivate an ecosystem of entrepreneurial effort, as the right mindset is often half the battle won in finding the right solution.

Link between Jugaad and Innovation

Our Indian practice of ‘jugaad’ has received a lot of attention as a way of thinking out of the box, re-purposing familiar items to find solutions within resource constraints.

Critics, however, say that while it reflects Indian ingenuity, it too often involves cutting corners to get past the system, and “making do” rather than creating excellence. But the spirit of jugaad goes well beyond that: Google the phrase ‘frugal innovation’, and the first twenty hits will all relate to Indian inventions.

There’s the GE MAC 400, a handheld electrocardiogram (ECG) device that costs Rs 50,000 (the cheapest alternative costs more than Rs 1 lakh), reducing the cost of a cardiogram to 50 rupees, and the Tata Swachh, a Rs 1,500 water purifier (ten times cheaper than its nearest competitor). Indian biotech firms have dramatically reduced the price of insulin injections and hepatitis-B vaccines (the latter from $15 a shot to ten cents).