Separately, N.R. Narayana Murthy, the chairman of Infosys, recently sold US$38 million in shares in his company to start a new venture capital fund. Raghavan, the former Infosys executive, has invested about US$100 million in startups like Connexios Life Sciences, which is developing drugs to treat diabetes and other diseases. Many Indian universities have also started entrepreneurship programs and classes.
Vivek Wadhwa, a former technology entrepreneur who now researches innovation, said the climate for startups in India was a lot better than it was a few years ago. It should continue to improve, he said, in part because companies like General Electric have hired tens of thousands of engineers in India to work in research and development.
“Once they have been working on these projects for a few years they will outgrow the companies that they are working for,” he said. “They will hook up with these entrepreneurs that failed” on previous startup attempts and create new companies.
Another change may augur well. Until early this decade, the Indian market was too small and isolated to make it very lucrative for businesses to develop products here, so most technology companies focused on selling services to the West, said Girish Paranjpe, joint chief executive of Wipro’s information technology business.
“That will change dramatically because the Indian market has become bigger,” he said.
In the last eight years, the size of the Indian economy has roughly doubled along with the importance of global trade. There could still be something to envy and fear.
RSS