'Shut down poor incubators'

Tarun Khanna, a Harvard University Professor who describes himself as a part-time entrepreneur, thinks of India as an entrepreneurship lab.

In an interaction with Deccan Herald, the Chairman, Expert Committee on Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Niti Aayog, outlined the report prepared by his team. The report within the AIM (Atal Innovation Mission) framework makes recommendations to address the entrepreneurship challenges in India.

The report uses a three-tier pyramid framework to highlight short, medium and long-term recommendations to boost innovation. The pinnacle of the pyramid represents areas where immediate action can be taken, and the payoffs are also almost immediate. This tier is charecterised by a mechanism that promotes innovation through incentives and incubators.

In India, industries and academic institutions are not connected, and the lack of a continuum here bears heavily on innovation. “Our incubators have tended to operate as silos. What incubators need to do is act as a hub for different parties to come together,” he said. Incubators are not ends in themselves, it is only when they can facilitate the creation of a multi-party support system, do they become effective.

Monitoring the impact of incubators will go a long way in improving their efficiency, he said. “There has to be a measure to establish if an incubator is doing well or not, and that is absent.” More importantly, “Incubators that perform poorly beyond a certain time frame must be shut down. This way, resources will be released for newer ideas and innovation.”

“The middle of the pyramid highlights medium-term issues — those that are not simple enough to be solved immediately, but that can be addressed within a five-seven year time frame if remedial steps are taken now,” the report says. For immediate measures to come into play, the physical, educational, financial and regulatory infrastructure within the ecosystem should be well-defined.

However, the base of the pyramid is the bigger problem in India, which is deep-rooted in our culture. “In India, the absence of a financial and psychological safety is the biggest obstacle to venture into entrepreneuship,” he said. Embedded in our culture is a tendency to be risk-averse and it would be the longest and most tedious issue to resolve. “Reformation in our approach to entrepreneuship, which will take generations,  will lay foundation to a profound transformation in the entrepreneurial fabric in India,” he said. Khanna is also part of the founding team at Axilor, a platform that supports early-stage entrepreneurs.