Bangalore’s innovators

What is it that we really have in plenty, running across the streets and by lanes of Bangalore? The cynic will say ‘chaos’ or something similar. But, one has to admit, it is entrepreneurship . India is not exactly cash rich, it doesn’t have the best universities in the world and it certainly doesn’t have a government that is about to bank roll your fantasies, dream plans and change-the-world ideas. Given that education and funding generally lead to the big ideas, and there isn’t exactly a surplus in those ingredients at the moment, Bangalore is on the right path with entrepreneurship .
Entrepreneurship  is mostly the result of a lack of jobs and opportunities to match available skills and, critically, inclinations. Or, people are driven to entrepreneurship  in a bid to do what they love most, because even private enterprise tends to get bureaucratised and boring.

Life as an entrepreneur isn’t easy. But Bangalore has been trying to nurture an ecosystem that is firmly on the side of an entrepreneurial mind. Over the last decade or so, becoming an entrepreneur has become the cool thing to do. Any why not? Working in a regular corporate job, 10 to 11 abhorrent hours a day, would perhaps lead to stressful meetings where PowerPoint presentations speak of elusive concepts like value addition and innovation with none of it actually in sight. Otherwise, wouldn’t these companies that loftily speak of delivering innovation be filing patents instead?

On the other hand, an entrepreneur gets to walk his talk, experiment, create real innovation and deal in do-or-die value addition. Take the story of MP Ganesh Kumar, a drop out from the BEL School and College who started work as Ciber president, Raghuram Kote’s, driver. Today, he runs NG Associates, a facilities management company that has a targeted turnover of Rs40 lakh in just 18 months of launch. Ganesh was funded by the Kote Foundation to become a 100% certified, blue-blooded entrepreneur.

Take the story of Nag and Darshan, who are supported by the National Entrepreneurship  Network (NEN). The two Sir M Visvesvaraya Institute of Technology students started a hot dog stand to raise funds for their idea of surveillance accessories for the Department of Defence Research and Development. They aren’t waiting for elusive seed capital to come knocking on their doors.

Take the story of R Sundar Rajan’s Just Books that rents books and uses self help methods built around RFID; or Vaibhav Kaley’s Wonder Grass that focuses on bamboo-based building systems to provide habitat solutions, which are sustainable as well as affordable. Both these companies, along with a host of others, have been incubated at the highly successful Nadathur S Raghavan Center for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) at IIM-B. Combining academic insight with real life ideas, the NSRCEL interfaces budding entrepreneurs with industry and grooms them into growing enterprises.

Take the story of Sitashwa Srivastava and Manik Kinra of Jade Magnet, a crowd sourcing platform for creative work. The two youngsters came up with the idea of using crowd sourcing while doing a course in International Entrepreneurship . It became their college project and continued to grow as both of them took up jobs — one in Bangalore and the other in the UK. Finally, the idea began to bubble and brew to a point where both gave up their jobs and decided to see if Jade Magnet could be turned into the next big thing. They stumbled upon the Bangalore chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), now in its 10th year, and decided to see if TiE could power their dreams. They were short listed by TiE for the Entrepreneurship  Acceleration Program (EAP) that seeks to fast track entrepreneurs through mentoring and by helping good ideas find great money. “We discovered that people were interested in the idea, but no one wanted to fund us,” says Srivastava.

“However, the fact that TiE short listed us for the EAP program helped validate our idea and gave us a shot of confidence.” Finally, a TiE charter member invested in their idea and is giving it a commercial make over. The effort is starting to bear fruit. Jade Magnet has begun to show bottomline growth and Sitashwa Srivastava and Manik Kinra of Jade Magnet are back on the road with their dog-and-pony show, convinced that Bangalore will help them find the additional funding they need.

There are thousands like Ganesh, Nag, Darshan, Sundar, Vaibhav, Sitashwa and Manik in Bangalore. The system that supports entrepreneurs, while it exists, needs to become more broad based and go beyond supporting technology. They need to adjust to the fact that Bangalore will throw up raw ideas rather than finished business plans. NEN, NSRCEL, TiE and the numerous incubation cells in local colleges, need to nudge themselves a bit, show more moxie, to make Bangalore the natural home of entrepreneurship.