Slowly but surely the product ecosystem in India is getting better. I looked at it six months back and since then it has get more fleshed out. Yet much work remains to be done. Read on…
Archive for the 'entrepreneurship' Category
Product Ecosystem in India: Progress But More Needs to be Done
Published by May 1st, 2007 in innovation, software industry and entrepreneurship. 2 CommentsPointer to Santosh Gurlahosur’s summary of the NASSCOM Workshop for early-stage product startups that Prat Moghe and I did yesterday.
In Praise of Jugaad Innovation
Published by April 18th, 2007 in innovation and entrepreneurship. 5 CommentsIn the last two weeks Carlos Ghosn (CEO, Renault) and Rick Wagoner (CEO, GM) have praised jugaad innovation in Indian manufacturing. They are putting their finger on the most important characteristic of the Indian innovation ecosystem. India has leant that oftentimes less is more and innovation happens, not despite, but because of limited resources.
Confronting Cultural Gravity
Published by April 16th, 2007 in entrepreneurship and inter-cultural issues. 4 CommentsProduct startups in India have to overcome the cultural gravity that exists on account of IT Services firms. Here are five cultural changes that are needed…
Don’t Fall For the “Get Big Fast” Strategy
Published by March 29th, 2007 in investing and entrepreneurship. 2 CommentsThis S+B article studies the dot-com failure rates and concludes that there was too little, not too much entry. The real problem was that there wasn’t sufficiently diverse range of exploratory investments. A herd based investing paradigm was in place. Had there been more diversity maybe more businesses would have failed, but these failures would have been smaller and would have provided less costly lessons.
Entrepreneurship Education Takes Root in India
Published by March 21st, 2007 in innovation and entrepreneurship. 0 CommentsSramana writes that India is poised to see an entrepreneurship boom in the next 10 years. She is right! Entrepreneurship is going global. VCs are partly responsible. Also playing a role is the spread of entrepreneurship education. High quality entrepreneurship education centers have sprouted in all the major cities…
Should We Start an Intrapreneurship SIG in Bangalore?
Published by March 6th, 2007 in entrepreneurship. 6 CommentsIntrapreneurship is particularly challenging when it has to be done from a remote development center in India. This has led to a debate among some of us on how best to promote intrapreneurship in India. Should we form a Special Interest Group (SIG) to do this? Or is this best left for each company to figure out themselves?
A Different Startup Mantra
Published by March 3rd, 2007 in investing, entrepreneurship and organizational design. 3 CommentsThere are two startup worlds out there. One is about comparative selling and the other one is about displacement selling. One is about leveraging disruptive technology and the other is about leveraging exogenous effects. One is about mastery over disintermediation, commoditization, or offshoring to reduce time-to-market; the other is about using it help the customer do legacy stuff for less. These subtle but significant differences in the startup mantra have big implications for entrepreneurs and VCs.
Bypass Mobile Operator, Focus on Handset Vendor
Published by February 20th, 2007 in entrepreneurship and mobile industry. 3 CommentsMobile operators make poor market and distribution partners for startups creating new services. A better approach is to go after the handset vendors as they are trying to create use-based sub-brand and their ecosystems.
Musings about Role of Partnerships in Startups
Published by February 5th, 2007 in investing, entrepreneurship and organizational design. 3 CommentsThere are two types of opportunities for startups – one arising from new consumption and the other from value chain transformation. The startup firm evolution is different for these two kinds of opportunities. In the first case, thought leadership goes into creating an offering power that is then leveraged to acquire customers followed by partners. In the second case, thought leadership goes first in building a category power which then underpins strategic partnering and customer acquisition. Read on…
No, Entrepreneurship in IT Services is Not Over!
Published by January 19th, 2007 in software industry and entrepreneurship. 2 CommentsIt’s wrong to suggest that the game is over in IT services in India and no new startups are needed.
Mobile Business Model Success Scorecard v1
Published by January 9th, 2007 in investing, entrepreneurship and mobile industry. 0 CommentsThere is no doubt that mobile is the new frontier, especially in Asia, for a host of applications. However if you are a startup, getting it right has been tough. Several conditions need to be met. I have pulled together a business model self-assessment scorecard that’s probably over-simplified, opinionated and incomplete. Take a look…
8 Outdated Notions of Entrepreneurship
Published by January 6th, 2007 in entrepreneurship. 5 CommentsPenelope Trunk has an outstanding post on entrepreneurship about how entrepreneurship is different than it was even five years ago. Barriers to entry are lower than ever, and if you measure success in terms of personal growth and flexible work, then the success rates for entrepreneurs is sky high.
An Indian Dream
Published by December 28th, 2006 in investing, entrepreneurship and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 0 CommentsI just got back from my short vacation, opened The Economist and was flipping the pages when a picture of Sanjeev Aggarwal caught my attention. There is a nice profile of him, called Delhi Dreams, in the Face Value section of this issue. What a pleasant surprise! For me Sanjeev represents an important new trend. I believe that we are close to a tipping point in seeing many more “India-out” ventures…
Innovation Is Like a Bamboo Thicket
Published by December 21st, 2006 in innovation and entrepreneurship. 0 CommentsIndia-based entrepreneurs don’t often realize that a single innovation, no matter how good, doesn’t get results. A collection of different innovations need to be clumped together to get results. They need to think of innovation as a bamboo thicket rather than as an oak tree.
Rethinking SaaS for India
Published by December 19th, 2006 in bottom-of-the-pyramid, software industry, entrepreneurship and SaaS. 1 CommentSandHill.com has recently published “Rethinking SaaS for India”, my second article in the series India DNA Talk. I write about how SaaS can be tailored to meet the needs of a whole new segment of micro-firms in India. The addressable market opportunity is large. Like with all bottom-of-the-pyramid opportunities, this requires in-market incubation and in-market experimentation to get to the right model. I am optimistic that this will happen soon. Do you share that optimism?
Growth Anatomy Series Roundup
Published by December 18th, 2006 in innovation, software industry, entrepreneurship, mobile industry, bottom-of-the-pyramid and roundups. 0 CommentsThis series started innocently enough as a follow-up to my SandHill.com article but somehow it quietly picked-up momentum. It covers a fair amount of ground about how to go about bottom-on-the-pyramid opportunities and why doing that is important to the software industry. Below are all the articles in this series. Check them out if you have missed any.
Growth Anatomy: Call to Action
Published by December 16th, 2006 in innovation, software industry, entrepreneurship and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 1 CommentSuccess with BOP requires breakthrough product architectures, process models and/or business models. Often it also requires building new market structures and value chains. All this can only happen with in-market incubation and constraint-based management. It’s not easy, but it can be done. As we have seen, telecom, PC, semiconductor and healthcare industries are doing it. So far the enterprise software industry is watching from the sidelines. Why is this the case?
Transplanting Silicon Valley Entrepreneurship
Published by December 5th, 2006 in entrepreneurship. 0 CommentsIn today’s International Herald Tribune, Thomas Crampton has an engaging story, German Brothers Break the Mold, about the three brothers in Germany who became successful student turned entrepreneurs. They setup an auction website, Alando.de, in 1999 that was soon bought by Ebay. Their next venture was a mobile content company, Jamba, which Verisign bought recently for $237m. Key take-aways from the story are that they…
Entrepreneurship and Institution Building Mindset
Published by November 25th, 2006 in entrepreneurship and book review. 3 CommentsIn India the Tatas, Wipro and Infosys are torch bears of a tradition of institution building. Subroto Bagchi’s book, The High -Performance Entrepreneur, shows that this tradition is alive and well… this is a useful book for all aspiring entrepreneurs. It gives a ringside view of MindTree’s journey so far and uses that storyline to drive home some basic truths about entrepreneurship, the most important of which is that choosing the institutional building mindset is the best decision that an entrepreneur can make!
David Kushner writes a delightful cover story, The Firefox Kid, in the Nov issue of IEEE Spectrum. I enjoyed it at three levels. First, it’s a nice story about how Firefox came about. Second, it describes Parakey – a cool tool…
Mobile Operators are Impediments to Innovation
Published by November 19th, 2006 in innovation, entrepreneurship and mobile industry. 0 CommentsI think mobile operators have become an impediment to innovation. They are reactive, risk averse, and unable to develop markets for new services. If things continue down the current path, mobile operators will be seen in the same unsympathetic light as the big music labels… need to shift gears from mass marketing to niche marketing; from servicing demand to creating demand; and, from doing it all yourself to building value chains with other services providers, content providers, handset vendors and the like. This is an orbit change.
Encouraging Student Entrepreneurship in India
Published by November 12th, 2006 in entrepreneurship. 1 CommentToday I was part of a panel discussion along with Kanwal Rekhi and Dr Sridhar Mitta … to get the students to look at entrepreneurship in a favorable light… So far, the India IT industry has been built by executive-turned-entrepreneurs. But now the local market is ripe… and Indian consumers are viable targets…
Are Things Looking Up for Product Innovation in India?
Published by November 11th, 2006 in innovation, software industry and entrepreneurship. 1 CommentLast year I was part of the team that selected 8 companies for NASSCOM 2005 Innovation Awards… The cycle for the 2006 Awards is now getting underway. I am again on the panel and this will give me chance to assess how much progress we are making in India on product innovation… I am cautiously optimistic…
