Entrepreneur India – July 2019

JULY 2019 l ENTREPRENEUR l 15

Startup and Standup

Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business
School, Director, Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard
University; and Co-Founder, Axilor

L

ate in the spring

of 2015, I was

privileged to be

asked to chair

a committee on

Entrepreneurship

and Innovation constituted

under the auspices of NITI

Aayog (now enshrined as Atal

Innovation Mission or AIM).

We took care to ensure the

committee was drawn from

very diverse walks of life, to

include entrepreneurs (with

track records of building for-

profit and social enterprises),

financiers, scientists and

heads of academic institutions

and, finally, several who

have experience liaising with

government. Each member

has helped us access a broad

network of individuals not on

the committee, in India and in

parts of the Indian diaspora.

Stimulating Innovation

The conceptual model of an

Entrepreneurial Pyramid

offers a prioritization of the

many efforts that will propel

entrepreneurship forward.

First, we recognize that

success breeds success, so,

in the interests of building a

constituency for change, we

must identify actions that

yield short-term payoffs. The

so-called ‘top layer’ of our

pyramid model does this.

It identifies upgrading and

broadening of the incubators

that pepper the Indian

landscape, a commitment

to using competition and

prizes to encourage grass-

roots innovation, and the

initiation of a symbolic but

also substantive national

entrepreneurship movement.

As part of the founding team

of Axilor in Bengaluru, I have

tried to put the principles of

this report into action.

China Comparison

I’ve attempted in my work -

recounted in my books Billions

of Entrepreneurs and Trust

• Creating the foundation
  for entrepreneurship in
  developing countries - to
  distill the conceptual
  differences between the
  societal transformations of
  China and India.
  Despite the flux and largely

positive economic changes

in each of the two countries

in the last decades, the “iron

frames” that gird these

changes are radically different.

China features a top-

down model of development,

with Communist Party

articulating a central direction

and circumscribing all but

marginal dissent. Local Party

officials have increasing

economic autonomy, which

they have used to amazing

effect, but only within a

context of severely constrained

political centralization. The

Party political line simply

must be toed.

India exhibits greater

heterogeneity and pluralism,

manifesting itself to the

outsider as chaos, but

also enabling productive

ferment on the ground. An

inefficient market, but a

market nonetheless, results

from competition at multiple

levels in providing services,

competing for talent, political

horse-trading.

While China courts

foreign capital and has only

reluctantly acknowledged the

private sector, its internal

opacity and lack of private

property rights emasculate

its internal markets in

comparison to the parts of

India where competition is

allowed to run amuck.

As the Prime Minister

said in his Independence Day

address on August 15, 2015,

“ Startup and Stand-up”. I

couldn’t agree more. Let’ s do

it sans partisanship and with

team spirit.

EXPERT

SPEAKS

“India exhibits

greater

heterogeneity

and pluralism,

manifesting

as chaos,

but enabling

productive

ferment on the

ground.”