From the Editor-in-Chief
Welcome to the August 2014 issue of the Technology Innovation Management Review. This month's editorial theme is Innovation and Entrepreneurship in India. It is my pleasure to introduce our guest editor, Kalyan Kumar Guin, Dean and Professor in the Vinod Gupta School of Management at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, who has assembled a diverse team of authors from India to offer their perspectives on the past, present, and future of innovation and entrepreneurship in India.
Our September issue will be unthemed, after which we will revisit the theme of Cybersecurity. For future issues, we welcome submissions of articles on technology entrepreneurship, innovation management, and other topics relevant to launching and growing technology companies.
Please contact us with article topics and submissions, suggestions for future themes, and any other feedback.
We hope you enjoy this issue of the TIM Review and will share your comments online.
Chris McPhee
Editor-in-Chief
From the Guest Editor
Empirical evidence suggests a positive correlation between economic growth, innovation, and entrepreneurship development. In India, with the liberalization of the economy over the last two decades, the interactions between these factors have generated considerable interest, particularly among the key stakeholders: government, industry, and academia.
In this issue of the TIM Review, our authors collectively provide an overview of various issues relevant to Indian entrepreneurship and innovation, and the role of stakeholders in promoting it. The issues addressed by the researchers are of national and international importance across all aspects including theoretical perspectives, policy development, and practical applicability. This issue explores the perspective of a few selected researchers who will provide a deep insight into how the stakeholders of the innovation ecosystem represented by the government, industry, and academia can best be leveraged to optimize value for all stakeholders and citizens.
In the first article, Rituparna Basu provides her critical assessment as an entrepreneurship exponent into the growth prospects and challenges to entrepreneurship education in India. The article emphasizes the value of entrepreneurship education for students and not just for those planning a startup.
Next, Ravindra Abhayankar highlights the Government of India’s role in promoting innovation through policy initiatives for entrepreneurship development. He also identifies gaps in the Indian innovation ecosystem and suggests an agenda for researchers based on his experience as the advisor to the Government of India for innovative product development
Shiv Tripathi provides new insights and evidence from India on the role of managers as agents in successful service-based innovations based on a three-year study of 70 business executives belonging to 20 large organizations operating in India. The article also compares the practices followed by Indian organizations with global organizations operating in India to understand the contextual issues of service innovations.
Susmita Ghosh, Bhaskar Bhowmick, and Kalyan Kumar Guin emphasize the challenges faced by entrepreneurs due to perceived environmental uncertainty. The authors, while highlighting the Indian perspective, examine the means of measuring and addressing uncertainty in an emerging country context.
Punit Saurabh, Phrabha Bhola, and Kalyan Kumar Guin highlight the roles of important stakeholders of knowledge systems in the creation of innovation ecosystems. Through a pictorial representation of the knowledge system landscape, they illustrate and review existing models of knowledge systems, and they provide recommendations for each of the three major stakeholders in the proliferation of innovation and entrepreneurship in India: government, industry, and higher-education institutions.
Finally, Ritu Dubey answers the question "What is the future of entrepreneurship in India?" by identifying the challenges and opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship in India and by describing the Government of India’s measures and programs designed to support an emerging startup ecosystem in India.
Although there are several interesting and divergent views and methodologies represented in this issue, the authors all agree that there is an urgent need to promote the values of innovation and entrepreneurship in a developing nation such as India, because it will bring many benefits in the long run. I hope that you find the issue to be beneficial and will gain interesting insights into the nature of entrepreneurship being practiced in India.
Kalyan Kumar Guin
Guest Editor
Keywords: education, entrepreneurship, government support, India, innovation, knowledge systems, policy, service innovation, stakeholders, startups, uncertainty, university
Comments
Innovation vs Proven Technologies
Three types of Innovations in India can be talked about.
1. Innovation by rich and wealthy corporates means developing new products and new market segments- they focus on new revenue sources and not technologies mainly.
2. Some software technologies get angel financing to survive but they are just the 0.1 % of total potential which is mainly killed because of poor marriage between technical experts and investors. Procedures and lack of understanding at investors are the main killers.
3. Innovation that do get a final shape, especially in industries are killed as they never find the first few applications. Industries ask for proven records, and their is little incubation to such technologies and no government support. 90% of innovations killed after the birth comes in this Category. We in India are follower countries, We are not G8 countries where innovations are promoted and not killed by such questiosn of 'proven records of applications' etc. Especially for software technology pilot testing cost's mindset is not easy to change, the true killer of innovations in India lies in the heads of Senior managers, who feel proud in killing domestic knowledge and innovation, but would readily adopt a foreign technology at ten times the cost.