Kiran Mazumdar Shaw says Indian start-ups need to scale up

A vibrant start-up scene is welcome, but newly incorporated companies should aim for scaling up their innovations given the peculiar needs of a large country like India, Biocon chairperson and Managing Director Kiran Mazumdar Shaw said on Thursday.

"India can not afford just to be a start-up nation, we have to scale up because we are too large a nation and economy to be like what Israel is doing," Shaw said at the second SBI Economics and Banking Conclave here.

She said Israel is the undisputed start-up nation, but it can live off licencing the innovations which come from the start-ups, but in India, the companies have to focus on exploiting them commercially.

"I think we need to focus on how do we scale up these very successful start-ups. That is where the impediments are in a country like ours because we will never be able to scale up to the potential that they have," she said.

Shaw said in sectors like biotechnology, the emergence of start-ups is resulting in a reverse brain drain, with talent returning to India to join the new companies.

It can be noted that many start-ups have flourished over the last few years in the country, which now has the entire ecosystem, including incubation centres, co-working places and funding sources, in place.

This led Prime Minister Narendra Modi to exhort the people to have more such companies in his Independence Day speech.