E Week is about celebrating the entrepreneurial spirit in our people... so we thought we'd ask some researchers what they thought about entrepreneurship in India.
We spoke to Rafiq Dossani, Executive Director of the South Asia Program at the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. Dossani's research interests include Asian entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and financial, technology, telecommunications and energy-sector reforms in India. His views on entrepreneurship in India are quite thought provoking...
"Not everyone wants to be, or should be, an entrepreneur. India's urban tragedy is that there are fewer firms started than there are entrepreneurs, just as the rural tragedy is the reverse: there are too many unwilling small farmer-entrepreneurs who would prefer steady employment to the pervasive risk that small-farm agriculture offers.
The logic for entrepreneurship is simple: an entrepreneur has a vision for the long-term growth of his idea. Converting that to reality means facing obstacles in accessing start-up finance, understanding markets and distribution and training to build his own and his fellow-employees' human capital.
Converting those visions to reality is most urgent at this time: India has opened its doors to large, private established businesses, both domestic and foreign, that will quickly demolish the lakhs of me-too small businesses that currently dot the Indian landscape. If those entrepreneurs, and thousands of new ones, can be empowered through networks of knowledge, they can access what they need to build competitive businesses. Of course, the government must do its part, building the sensible regulatory institutions that will protect the entrepreneur without hurting entrepreneurship; institutions such as university-industry partnerships, venture capital regulations and the like.
The message is clear - While India's reforms and liberalization must progress as planned, it is imperative to create an environment where the small entrepreneur is empowered to become competitive.
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