ICT & Entrepreneurship : Enabling change – Jayashri Ramamurti
There are more entrepreneurs in India today than at any other time in history, and many are focusing not just on technology and business domains but also social and political empowerment.
“The shift from innovation to actualisation is becoming more and more important, not only for big corporate sector companies but for small traders, tiny manufacturers (including lone home-based workers), street vendors and farm labour. Indian civil society can play a key role in making India a garden of many blooms,” according to SEWA founder Ela Bhatt.
Rita and Umesh Anand, in their book “Inventive Indians,” have documented many of these examples of social entrepreneurship. The balance for emerging economies to strike is between scale and sustainability – many of these can be further enhanced with the use of ICTs.
Innovations need to be put on bigger national and international platforms for replication and scale; one challenge is that many innovators are so absorbed in their immediate local objectives that they would prefer to leave issues of national awareness and policy to others in the innovation ecosystem.
Business and social entrepreneurship can be accelerated in India via more involvement of educational institutes, ICT companies, social investors, and corporate social responsibility initiatives. Some of the academic institutes such as IIM-B have been nurturing startups in their entrepreneurship centres, but the cases are few and far between and more educational institutes need to address entrepreneurship, according to V. Sridhar, author of “The Telecom Revolution in India.”
Niche areas such as e-education and e-healthcare are areas with lots of potential. “It is time for unleashing the power of mobile broadband to the masses including low-cost Internet Telephony – an operators’ nightmare as voice will become almost free,” Sridhar cautions. Telecom is becoming more and more software centric. In today’s era, content and applications are the important drivers for adoption.
Sridhar identifies notable digital players in India such as OnMobile and IMI Mobile (VAS), Hungama and IndiaGames (digital entertainment) and Flipkart (e-commerce). Start-ups should not just focus on building a web site but look at customers’ pain points in totality and provide an integrated solution.
Lots of government services need the help and support of start-ups to digitally enable them, opening up huge opportunities, advises Sridhar.
Madan Mohan Rao is Research project Director, Mobile Monday. He can be reached at madan@techsparks.com
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