A First Step to Success. . .
“The largest entrepreneurial opportunities are found while addressing the biggest challenges”. Encouraging innovation is the first step to win the future of a country. But pinning our hopes on innovation has far more urgent reasons. India's future growth will have to come from new industries that create new products and processes. The only durable strength we have that
can withstand the downturns of economic crisis is — innovation. In recent years, India is witnessing a spurt in activity from first generation entrepreneurs, some innovative startups that have emerged as hot businesses today. Their ventures attract others to take that plunge of chucking a full-time job and starting up a business. Flipkart, an online e-commerce store is one such venture creating waves all over with more than 6 million registered users. Another compelling startup success story flows from BITS Pilani graduates as redBus.in, an online bus ticketing service to organize highly disorganized bus services in India. Shampoo sachets originated in India more than two decades ago, creating a market for a product that the poor had never before been able to afford. An Indian company has invented a cheaper Hepatitis B vaccine, bringing down the price from $15 per injection to less than $0.10. Even the financial sector has seen innovation. Just three years ago, there were only 15 million bank accounts in a country of 1.2 billion people. Indians concluded that if people won’t come to the banks, the banks should go to the people. The result has been the creation of brigades of traveling tellers with hand-held devices, who have converted the living rooms of village homes into makeshift branches, taking deposits as low as a dollar. More than 50 million new bank accounts have been established, bringing India’s rural poor into the modern financial system. Now is the time to unleash more brilliant innovations like these. E Week 2013 theme of “Innovating for India” will focus on fortifying India’s innovation to enhance productivity and erase unemployment from the society. It will play the role of a catalyst in bringing creative and effective innovations to the general public. This platform will recognize and promote creativity where innovative ideas can be proposed, shared and disseminated. This will be a national register of innovations which helps any individual to accentuate his/her remarkable innovations and convert them into viable business opportunities. It will also help these remarkable innovations reach a larger audience, who could take advantage and replicate the benefits of their respective communities. Awe-inspiring innovations have always pervaded the Indian economy. It is one of the reasons why there is more dynamism in the Indian economy than those who look only at the macroeconomic data believe. Sometimes it is important to stop looking at the forest and focus on the trees.
