How About a National Entrepreneurship Mission, Led by Nandan Nilekani?

As I was reporting and researching for this special report (Forbes India issue dated March 2) I was pleasantly surprised by the extent of thinking, and even action, that’s going on world over to get lab research out of the academic papers onto the market, and into people’s hands. Perhaps what economist Tyler Cowen last year said in his book The Great Stagnation about the slowing rate of innovation is right. (Interesting TED Talk by Cowen here.)

Be it the European Union, the United States, or Asian countries, all have begun connecting research with innovation with an aggression not seen in recent times. In India too, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Department of Scientific and Industrial Research  are warming up to the idea of keeping aside some venture money for truly risky ideas so that researchers play their full creative hand.

But my journalistic experience shows it’s more a cultural issue in India, than a funding crunch. Our educational institutions don’t practice a performance-linked reward system. Whether a researcher is a world class inventor or whether s/he is a paper publishing type, the rewards are more or less the same. Why should someone do research; one can teach students, publish papers and expect to get the same promotions or perks, says Ashutosh Sharma, professor in chemical engineering department at IIT Kanpur, also the Infosys Science Prize winner of 2010.

Prof Pradeep Khosla, dean of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and jury chair, Infosys Science Foundation, says it fittingly.  “As dean, I probably make more money than many CEOs because to keep me where I am they have to compete with the company that wants me. So it cannot be that because I am in a university, because I chose a life of being a Brahmin and I’m going to be given food and clothing for a living.”.

What’s good to hear that DST is toying with this idea and Khosla is working with the department to devise a peer review system that rewards excellence.

But I think the Braminical code needs to be broken on two more fronts: in the regular academic life so that intermittent stints in the industry are encouraged and rewarded. A few years ago government research institutions allowed people to apply for sabbatical to the industry, but hardly anyone avails it, says HK Mittal, secretary of the Technology Development Board at DST.

Secondly, to my mind, all engineering and scientific institutions should have a course in entrepreneurship. An interesting experiment is currently going on at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US – a 60-year-old agency with an annual budget of $6.8 billion. It’s an incubator called Innovation Corps.

In July 2011, Steve Blank, a retired serial entrepreneur who teaches a popular entrepreneurship course at Stanford University called Lean Launchpad, got a call from the NSF. Three months later, an ‘entrepreneurship boot camp” started at Stanford. In February, as the first batch of 21 teams (of 63 NSF-funded scientists and engineers) “graduate”, 19 of them are going to commercialize their technology.

Both Blank and NSF are blown away by the success.

A seasoned educator, Blank believes his course has cracked the code of entrepreneurship – he cannot tell a company if it can become the next Facebook, but given a portfolio of startups he can now increase the rate of success pretty dramatically. Consider taking low grade uranium feed stock and what comes out is high-grade weapons material. “We now know how to do this, because we have now understood what we have been doing wrong – we have been treating startups as smaller version of large corporation,” says Blank.

Even Blank was surprised by the I-Corps outcome. Guess what is happening now?

The NSF is getting 25 teams in the next quarter and will increase it to 50 teams by the year-end. And after two batches at Stanford, the programme will move to other universities, starting with Michigan and Georgia Tech. While NSF gives grants to researchers spread all over the US, it’s a few hot-spots like Cambridge in Massachusetts and Bay Area in California that are buzzing with the entrepreneurial energy.

It’s obvious that unhappy with the return on its huge research grant, NSF is trying to “engineer” the ecosystem in other parts of the country.

Can we do it in India?

“The biggest problem you’d encounter in doing this in India is the culture,” says Blank. He “suspects” scientists in India have an “exalted” view of who they are and “beating” them up in front of their peers might not get the same positive reaction that Blank and his team got at Stanford.

Silicon valley is not only a Mecca of technology, its more about culture, if you fail then people ask you over coffee what’s your next big startup whereas in India and Asia if you fail publicly it’s like a shame, says Blank, who has spent about a month in India during which he got a flavour of the country.

A failed entrepreneur is called ‘experienced’ in Silicon Valley. That culture is very important because it encourages people to take risk, if an experiment fails in the laboratory then you don’t throw the scientist. Entrepreneurship is like a laboratory where the entrepreneur has to keep doing experiments -- a good analogy now that Blank is dealing with bench scientists.

“That’s the scale and spirit someone needs to bring to Indian scientific and engineering institutions,” says Suri Venkatachalam, scientist-turned entrepreneur and CEO of Connexios Lifesciences. A PhD from the Indian Institute of Science who has struggled for over a decade setting up two companies in life sciences, Venkatachalam thinks the government should have a National Entrepreneurship Mission and a charismatic person like Nandan Nilekani should be “pulled out of UIDAI” and made in-charge of this mission. “Nilekani can energise all the institutions in this country,” he suggests.

I don’t think UIDAI is any less important or ambitious project but the idea of this Mission is worth considering. What do you think?

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.