By Milind Deora
On the heels of PM Narendra Modi’s ‘Make in India’ clarion call and shortly before he embarked on his US tour, I tweeted, ‘Customary business meetings aside, will @PMOIndia visit California, the hub of global innovation, and unveil “Innovate in India” too?’ My tweet was retweeted by legendary ‘entrepreneurship zealot’ Vinod Khosla.
Not only has Khosla long asserted that Silicon Valley is the nucleus of global innovation, he’s also the epitome of that assertion. American poet and musician Jim Morrison proffered, “The West is the best. Get here and we’ll do the rest.”
In spite of having lived in the US for almost five years and being a regular visitor to California, I never fully experienced Silicon Valley’s disruptive powers, until recently, when Mukesh Ambani, his daughter Isha, my wife Pooja and I dined with the world’s most powerful CEO Timothy Cook. Future-shocked, Isha, Pooja and I were witnessing with delight two of Silicon Valley’s celebrated natives trading ideas and their visions about what lies ahead for their companies and technology at large.
Reward Failure & Effort…
I’m no Alvin Toffler, but I know a futurist when I see one. And in the Bay Area, there’s no dearth of futurists. Think about it. What makes the region both an incubator and a cradle of entrepreneurship? Khosla tells me that Silicon Valley has an inherent “tolerance for intelligent failure and ability to dream the dreams”.
The former California governor, my friend Gray Davis, says, “Californians are distant from the power silos of New York and Washington DC. Northern California has the added benefit of great research universities, Stanford and Berkeley, and is the capital of venture capital.” He adds, “If you are born in the East (in US), you want to join a company. In the West, you want to start a company.”
…As Much As Success
So, it’s largely a cultural shtick. But whose culture? The company’s or the region’s? Regardless of how inventive an Indian company’s work culture is, outside of work hours, employees are immersed in the real world: a bittersweet external environment where, barring jugaad, we are relatively intolerant to intelligent failure. In California, work culture is passé Harvard Business Review jargon. Who needs work culture when innovation is ubiquitous and a way of life?
Silicon Valley’s newest disruptions, Uber and Netflix, have shaken up the taxi and limousine services industry and Hollywood respectively. Uber’s rapidly gaining ground in India and Bollywood’s anxiously awaiting the next shock of its life (ever since six-pack abs disrupted the industry a few years ago). In e-commerce, we are a decade behind Alibaba and Amazon in terms of offering customers access to original programming.
Indians are innately an innovative people. In India, we’re pretty effective at discovering simple solutions to our everyday problems. In the US, however, the sky’s the limit for Indian Americans. We’re the world’s best example of how judgemental and hyper-superstitious societies can sometimes obstruct innovation. Thankfully, internet movements like ‘The Makers of Things’ are inspiring Indian innovators and designers] to share their ideas and gain rock star-like appeal for their inventions.
Recently, the rock stars at Isro did us proud. With minimal political intervention — zero parliamentary oversight, in fact, which may not be in the best interest of transparency and accountability — a mandate to venture freely into the unknown and a little help from interplanetary gravity, Isro’s scientists performed a giant leap of faith for mankind. But had they failed, would we have celebrated their ingenuity and risk appetite? Certainly not.
Innovate in India
While India’s Mars Orbiter Mission has given Nasa’s scientists a run for their money (and an innovation-inferiority complex), other Indian centres of research, notably the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), still have a lot of catching up to do. DRDO and its US counterpart, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), were both founded in 1958. But many of Darpa’s innovations — the internet, for instance — have extended themselves beyond the department of defence and into our everyday lives.
In any organisation, the philosophy of taking calculated risks is inculcated in employees from the top. In a nation, it begins with the PM. Our PM, brilliant propagandist that he is, should exhort Indians to reward, even embrace, intelligent failure. He would do well to cajole some of the Indian Americans who were at Madison Square Garden to contribute toward this endeavour. After all, many did commit to returning to their motherland on live TV — with the unsurprising caveat, “…provided the business environment improves”.
‘Make in India’ and ‘Swachh Bharat’ are elemental Gandhian policy initiatives. But here’s another campaign that would make Gandhiji proud: ‘Innovate in India’. Mr Prime Minister, India is ready to upgrade her indigenous innovation capabilities from jugaad to navparivartan.
“I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos — especially activity that seems to have no meaning.” Forever trusting these immortally disruptive words of wisdom from Jim Morrison, and in the spirit of preserving the philosophy behind the UPA-initiated National Innovation Council, let’s presumptively pledge our wholehearted support to the ‘Innovate in India’ campaign.
(The writer is a former Union minister)
On the heels of PM Narendra Modi’s ‘Make in India’ clarion call and shortly before he embarked on his US tour, I tweeted, ‘Customary business meetings aside, will @PMOIndia visit California, the hub of global innovation, and unveil “Innovate in India” too?’ My tweet was retweeted by legendary ‘entrepreneurship zealot’ Vinod Khosla.
Not only has Khosla long asserted that Silicon Valley is the nucleus of global innovation, he’s also the epitome of that assertion. American poet and musician Jim Morrison proffered, “The West is the best. Get here and we’ll do the rest.”
In spite of having lived in the US for almost five years and being a regular visitor to California, I never fully experienced Silicon Valley’s disruptive powers, until recently, when Mukesh Ambani, his daughter Isha, my wife Pooja and I dined with the world’s most powerful CEO Timothy Cook. Future-shocked, Isha, Pooja and I were witnessing with delight two of Silicon Valley’s celebrated natives trading ideas and their visions about what lies ahead for their companies and technology at large.
Reward Failure & Effort…
I’m no Alvin Toffler, but I know a futurist when I see one. And in the Bay Area, there’s no dearth of futurists. Think about it. What makes the region both an incubator and a cradle of entrepreneurship? Khosla tells me that Silicon Valley has an inherent “tolerance for intelligent failure and ability to dream the dreams”.
The former California governor, my friend Gray Davis, says, “Californians are distant from the power silos of New York and Washington DC. Northern California has the added benefit of great research universities, Stanford and Berkeley, and is the capital of venture capital.” He adds, “If you are born in the East (in US), you want to join a company. In the West, you want to start a company.”
…As Much As Success
So, it’s largely a cultural shtick. But whose culture? The company’s or the region’s? Regardless of how inventive an Indian company’s work culture is, outside of work hours, employees are immersed in the real world: a bittersweet external environment where, barring jugaad, we are relatively intolerant to intelligent failure. In California, work culture is passé Harvard Business Review jargon. Who needs work culture when innovation is ubiquitous and a way of life?
Silicon Valley’s newest disruptions, Uber and Netflix, have shaken up the taxi and limousine services industry and Hollywood respectively. Uber’s rapidly gaining ground in India and Bollywood’s anxiously awaiting the next shock of its life (ever since six-pack abs disrupted the industry a few years ago). In e-commerce, we are a decade behind Alibaba and Amazon in terms of offering customers access to original programming.
Indians are innately an innovative people. In India, we’re pretty effective at discovering simple solutions to our everyday problems. In the US, however, the sky’s the limit for Indian Americans. We’re the world’s best example of how judgemental and hyper-superstitious societies can sometimes obstruct innovation. Thankfully, internet movements like ‘The Makers of Things’ are inspiring Indian innovators and designers] to share their ideas and gain rock star-like appeal for their inventions.
Recently, the rock stars at Isro did us proud. With minimal political intervention — zero parliamentary oversight, in fact, which may not be in the best interest of transparency and accountability — a mandate to venture freely into the unknown and a little help from interplanetary gravity, Isro’s scientists performed a giant leap of faith for mankind. But had they failed, would we have celebrated their ingenuity and risk appetite? Certainly not.
While India’s Mars Orbiter Mission has given Nasa’s scientists a run for their money (and an innovation-inferiority complex), other Indian centres of research, notably the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), still have a lot of catching up to do. DRDO and its US counterpart, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), were both founded in 1958. But many of Darpa’s innovations — the internet, for instance — have extended themselves beyond the department of defence and into our everyday lives.
In any organisation, the philosophy of taking calculated risks is inculcated in employees from the top. In a nation, it begins with the PM. Our PM, brilliant propagandist that he is, should exhort Indians to reward, even embrace, intelligent failure. He would do well to cajole some of the Indian Americans who were at Madison Square Garden to contribute toward this endeavour. After all, many did commit to returning to their motherland on live TV — with the unsurprising caveat, “…provided the business environment improves”.
‘Make in India’ and ‘Swachh Bharat’ are elemental Gandhian policy initiatives. But here’s another campaign that would make Gandhiji proud: ‘Innovate in India’. Mr Prime Minister, India is ready to upgrade her indigenous innovation capabilities from jugaad to navparivartan.
“I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos — especially activity that seems to have no meaning.” Forever trusting these immortally disruptive words of wisdom from Jim Morrison, and in the spirit of preserving the philosophy behind the UPA-initiated National Innovation Council, let’s presumptively pledge our wholehearted support to the ‘Innovate in India’ campaign.
(The writer is a former Union minister)
