At yesterday's Congressional hearing of Committee on Education, Labor, Health
and Pensions -which I saw late night (one of the perks of having a 3pm-9pm job)
on www.cspan.org
Bill Gates said that Indians will take decades to develop management, tasking
and marketing skills - to supplement their engineering skills - so cannot
become a technological hub - so have to import such engineers to USA - to
provide these "support services" to such enginnering guys.
Are Indian IIMs etc so bad -- are they good enough only to provide "servants"
to local offices of MNCs in India?
Umesh
umesh sharma <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Technology News
March 3, 2007, 7:26PM
A force for change sparks innovation in India
Professor pushes entrepreneurial thinking to createhope in rural areas
ALAN T. SARACEVIC
San Francisco Chronicle
CHENNAI, INDIA Tucked away on a leafy college campus in this booming city
of 7 million is a fiery 54-year-old professor who wants to change the way India
does business.
Ashok Jhunjhunwala doesn't teach business, though. He teaches engineering at
the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, one of the universities that
helps make up India's world-class system of technical schools.
The IITs, as they are known around the globe, have a long history of turning
out top engineers. Thousands of their graduates have flourished in the global
technology marketplace. Many have also stayed home, or returned to India, to
help fuel the world's most quickly growing tech economy.
But now academics like Jhunjhunwala along with the country's business leaders
want more for their students than good jobs. They're hoping to instill in their
graduates the spirit of innovation and incubation that has been the earmark of
Silicon Valley for decades. They want to use technological invention to help
India ascend.
To put it bluntly, India is sick and tired of simply cranking out the world's
best engineers. It now wants to create the world's best ideas.
To do so, it will borrow heavily from the model perfected in the U.S. Silicon
Valley, where the academics of Stanford mix with bankers and business experts
to create opportunity.
Graduates return homeNot surprisingly, many of the top supporters of IITs
push into "entrepreneurism" are the very graduates who found their way to the
San Francisco Bay Area over the past 20 or 30 years. The lessons they've
learned are now being passed back to their alma mater.
"IIT always undervalued innovation," said Jhunjhunwala, sounding a tone
somewhere between disappointed and indignant. "That's changing, and so is our
culture. You have to have the confidence and the ability to innovate. What's
great about the U.S. is they allow you to fail."
And, in a weird way, learning to fail could be the key to India's future. The
theory goes that fostering an entrepreneurial climate will help the country
overcome the massive internal social issues it faces, mostly centered on
poverty and illiteracy. The Indian intelligentsia believe deeply that the
solutions to these basic social dilemmas will come from enterprise rather than
government.
But that's not the only motivation. From a pure business standpoint,
innovating and creating its own Microsofts and Ciscos logically stands to
benefit India's spot in the global marketplace.
For over a decade now, this country's technology environment has been built
on cost arbitrage or, in plain English, cheap labor. And while that has served
India well, lifting the economy at a pace matched only by China, the next level
of global competitiveness lies in creating markets, rather than serving them.
So professors like Jhunjhunwala are creating business incubators and helping
students grow into entrepreneurs, fighting to foster a risk-taking, innovative
culture. But as with any fight, there is resistance.
The reluctant directorHalfway across the IIT campus in Chennai, a city
formerly known as Madras, M.S. Ananth sits in his well-appointed office
overlooking the campus, considering the direction his star professor is taking
over in the electrical engineering department.
Ananth is a chemical engineer by trade but a philosopher by personality who
finished his graduate work at the University of Florida. He likes to say things
like, "Education is the art of living gracefully in ignorance." He's a
traditional academic who wonders about the role business should play in
academia. And he happens to be Jhunjhunwala's boss, serving as director of IIT
Madras for five years.
Primarily, Ananth is concerned that U.S. academic models are creeping into
the IIT system. He worries that "people who are bringing in money are getting
more and more important. That worries me about the U.S. graduate schools." And
it's beginning to worry him about IIT as well.
"As teachers, we were taught that once you learn something, you go to class
and tell people about it," Ananth said. "Now, you go and patent it."
The concern is that profit motive will supersede the search for knowledge, a
notion that academics in the United States wrestled with in the 1960s.
At Stanford, businesses stemming from academic research are so common now
that the university doesn't even have a formal business incubator.
Entrepreneurship is in the culture.
Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford computer science professor and a 1983 IIT
graduate, understands where the director is coming from but doesn't see any
real threat.
"The IITs are doing the right thing. They have to jump-start the process,"
Motwani said. "And one way to do it is to create an institutional incubation
process. It's good for society at large. The only catch, I suppose, would be
conflicts of interest. Are academic principles being violated? It's a question,
but I'm not concerned about that."
Not in denialDespite his misgivings, Ananth is not in denial. He
understands the IT boom has created entrepreneurial possibilities never
imagined by chemical engineers of his generation. And so he is overseeing the
creation of a research and development park on the grounds of IIT Madras, where
620 acres of "academic land," as he put it, will be transformed into a center
where private industry can intermingle with academic innovation.
"Research parks have made tremendous contributions," Ananth said. "But you
must maintain the academic environment. The university is a place where you
look for unity in concepts."
And it's a place where young students hope to change the world.
Whatever tension may exist on a theoretical level at the IIT is less evident
on a practical plane. Jhunjhunwala and some of his colleagues, for instance,
recognized that his university did not want to get into the venture capital
business. So, true to his philosophy, he innovated.
The professor created a business incubator called the Tenet Group to help
foster technology startups. But, in a classic Indian twist, the mandate is
quite different.
Rather than trying to build the next Yahoo or Google to serve the world,
Tenet's entrepreneurs are hoping to serve the needs of rural India.
As Jhunjhunwala put it: "We formed Tenet with the objective of taking IIT
students to the next level. We also decided to focus on rural areas, where 700
million of India's 1.1 billion people still live. We're trying to show that
innovation can happen in our own markets. In doing so, we're coming up with new
ideas to help the nation."
Walking around the group's offices, which are integrated into the IIT campus,
one can see many examples of this "socially conscious entrepreneurship":
Midas Communications Ltd., one of the earliest Tenet companies, has grown to
deliver telecom services to millions across India using breakthrough wireless
routing. The company employs 600 in Chennai and does business in 25 other
countries.
Oops Private Ltd. is creating ways to bring video conferencing to remote
villages, using the existing, low-end technologies available. Oops has figured
out a way to do video conferencing on bandwidth as low as 20 Kbps, allowing
kids to attend classes with teachers hundreds of miles away.
ReMeDi Ltd. is using similar bandwidth optimization technology to help
villages that have no doctors. And they're delivering the systems for the
equivalent of $250.
The list goes on. Low-cost weather stations. Rural ATMs that cost about $1,200
compared with the usual $10,000 to $15,000. Thin-client computers that cost
about $100. It's all coming out of an IIT system once derided for a lack of
innovation.
Saloni Desi Crew is a 25-year-old entrepreneur working with Tenet to create
job-training software for small villages so people can be trained to perform
data entry and indexing jobs for clients around the world.
20 job centersShe has about 20 job centers in rural India, employing about
60 people.
"It's the best for everyone involved," Desi Crew said. "Cost-cutting for the
client. Work for the rural areas."
Whether these ideas translate into real money and big companies remains to be
seen, although Jhunjhunwala stresses that the rural solutions that work in
India would logically translate to underdeveloped nations worldwide.
If anything, the people behind the Tenet Group hope to do even more. As one
of their signs in the hallway says, their dreams are big: "Doubling per-capita
rural GDP of India" and "Building a few billion-dollar telecom product
companies in India."
A key obstacleOne of the key obstacles facing India's push to create a
high-flying startup culture is the environment in which the students and
entrepreneurs operate.
There is no institutional memory to tap into, no history or tradition of
entrepreneurship to cull. But there is a scattering of successful IIT graduates
to draw from.
In the Bay Area, groups like the Indus Entrepreneurs and Pan IIT have formed
to help Indian startups stateside and back in India. They offer practical
advice and even venture capital in some instances.
Indeed, in Chennai, Professor Jhunjhunwala sees his vision being realized.
"Innovation happens when three types get together: a professor, an
experienced businessperson and a student who does not know it can't be done,"
Jhunjhunwala said.
Umesh Sharma
5121 Lackawanna ST
College Park,
(Washington D.C. Metro Region)
MD 20740
1-202-215-4328 [Cell Phone]
Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
weblog: http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
website: www.gse.harvard.edu/iep
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Umesh Sharma
5121 Lackawanna ST
College Park,
(Washington D.C. Metro Region)
MD 20740
1-202-215-4328 [Cell Phone]
Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
weblog: http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
website: www.gse.harvard.edu/iep
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