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.

While we have become an IT services/consultancy power, we still lack in 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 Our education system is obsolete.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.

Is the Indian startup industry heading toward a slight stagnation after the tech acceleration of the pandemic era, or have we built a solid platform for the future?

Startup activity tends to happen in cycles and we are at the end of a super cycle when the world was awash with cheap capital; as a result India saw record inflows of venture capital. This era is over and as Warren Buffet said, ‘a rising tide lifts many boats but it’s when the tide runs out, that we see who’s swimming naked.” So the tough environment is brutally exposing weaknesses, over-valuations etc. This is healthy. Every once in a while you need a good drought that produces a Darwinian survival of the fittest shakeout and corrects excesses. That’s what is happening and we shouldn’t get despondent. Good firms will survive and thrive. Weak ones may fold but that will recycle talent and ideas. And there will be a new generation of startups that hopefully will be more innovative and competitive. We should only be concerned about whether we are doing things to strengthen the startup ecosystem in India. Today it is concentrated in a few large cities. We need to have a Bangalore in every district by 2047.

I think we are at this moment with AI. Every day there are 100s of new applications being developed by tens of thousands of people around the world and this is accelerating.

How important is the role of technology in ensuring sustainability and how much is India contributing to this?

You absolutely cannot get to net-zero without a lot of technology but its “TECHNOLOGY” broadly not just Information Technology. Every aspect of our life and industrial activity has to be re-examined and reinvented particularly energy, materials, waste. But talking about just IT, technologies like IoT, analytics, AI, play a central role by helping both individuals and organization monitor, manage and reduce their environmental footprint. IT helps by optimizing energy consumption, reducing waste, improving supply chain efficiency, and enabling remote work and collaboration. India’s IT sector which serves the whole world is playing an important role in helping organizations everywhere become more ecologically sustainable.

We seem to have entered a new AI Age with the advent of ChatGPT. How will this change business and what are the pitfalls?

I wrote an article recently comparing ChatGPT with the first steam engine. The first Newcomen engine was weak and inefficient but engineers like James Watt improved the design quickly and found many applications for it including steam powered machines and factories, steamboats, locomotives. The world changed completely within a 100 years. Those that embraced the new technology flourished, those who didn’t went out of business or became unemployed. I think we are at this moment with AI. Every day there are 100s of new applications being developed by tens of thousands of people around the world and this is accelerating. Every business will change. Every profession and job will change really fast. Slow adopters will likely suffer. There are many more challenges out there with AI including people, companies and countries using it for harmful purposes. There’s an increasing concentration of power in just a handful of companies that are winning the AI arms race including Microsoft and Google. And the possibility of a Terminator like scenario is real. All this says that governments must quickly move to regulate the development and application of AI. But how can you regulate something that is mutating so quickly and which you don’t understand?

There are way more fundamental issues we have to solve to become a $5 trillion let alone a $10 trillion economy. We have created almost zero net new jobs in the last 7-8 years. This can become catastrophic.

How important is Deep Tech in ensuring India becoming a $10 trillion economy in quick time. Where does India stand in this regard?

No idea. Probably big. But there are way more fundamental issues we have to solve to become a $5 trillion let alone $10 trillion economy. Creating more jobs is high on that list. We have created almost zero net new jobs in the last 7-8 years even as 100 million Indians have entered the workforce. This can become catastrophic. Indian industry is very concentrated in <2% of firms that are becoming bigger while the rest remain tiny and stunted. We need to see many more firms that have a growth mindset. Our judicial system is broken; you can’t have a country of 1.4 billion people and a multi-trillion economy on a dysfunctional system. I can go on and on. Solving these problems is way more important, urgent and difficult than developing deep tech capability although it’s not either-or.

What do you think of the government’s India2047 vision and are we on track to achieve that?

The goals articulated by our PM in the New India by 2047 vision are audacious and inspiring. As with any such ambitious and complex undertaking, my sense is we are making more progress on some of them particularly on improving infrastructure and embracing digital. The goal of creating a society that is free from discrimination with access to quality education, healthcare, justice, may be the most important of them all and needs greater focus and leadership.

sunilr@cybermedia.co.in