CELEBRATE AND RECOGNIZE INNOVATIONS, NOT JUST COMMERCIAL SUCCESS

Ravi Venkatesan was Chairman of Microsoft India, Bank of Baroda and Cummins India. He's Chairman of Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, a Venture Partner with Unitus Seed Fund and Founder of Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship. Here he talks about a wide range of issues, problems, solutions and the road leading to 2047.

- Sunil Rajguru

While we have become an IT services/ consultancy power, we still lack in W innovation. What more can the industry and government do to ensure innovation and more Make in India products to be created?

I won't entirely agree with the statement that we 'lack in innovation". Within IT services itself, the Global Delivery Model and accompanying innovations in scaling talent has been a game changer. Our IT services companies are doing a lot of innovation for clients. Our startup ecosystem is evolving from largely me-too businesses to several that are working on innovative ideas or applying new technologies like LLMs in innovative ways. Things like India Stack didn't come out of thin air; it was developed by people from the same IT ecosystem. But it's fair to say that there is lots of headroom to improve. For instance, it should be very concerning to us that when it comes to Foundation Models, no Indian company is in the game making us reliant on a few US firms. There is much that can be done by government, private sector and society at large. These are not new ideas. They simply need to be done.

1. Our education system is obsolete. It trains people to do things that machines can do better. We need to foster curiosity, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity. Beyond that our primary and secondary system is failing to produce a literate and numerate workforce which is detailed in the ASER reports.

2. Indian firms including stars like Infosys and TCS underinvest in R&D and this needs to be ramped up. The industry has to evolve faster from renting IQ to creating more IP.

3. There needs to be much better collaboration between companies and academia; this is improving in a couple of our elite IITs but we need to see much more.

4. We have to celebrate and recognize innovators and innovations, not just commercial success, so that more people are inspired to innovate.