Author: Alan T. Saracevic
Publication: San Francisco Chronicle
Date: February 25, 2007
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/02/25/BUG5LOA6A21.DTL&type=printable
Introduction: Already a tech power, India
hopes to build a reputation for innovation
"Be the change you want to see in the
world." -- Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi
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. Or accounting. 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, with a good portion
landing in the Bay Area. Many have also stayed home, or returned to India,
to help fuel the world's fastest-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 Silicon Valley, where the academics of Stanford mix with
bankers and business experts to create opportunity. Not surprisingly, many
of the top supporters of IIT's push into "entrepreneurism" are the
very graduates who found their way to the 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, his 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 its widespread social problems, mostly
centered on poverty and illiteracy. The Indian intelligentsia believe deeply
that the solutions to these basic 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 place in the global marketplace.
For more than 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 that could rival Silicon Valley's
someday.
But as in any good fight, there is resistance.
The reluctant director
Halfway 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," said
Ananth. "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 that the university doesn't even have a formal business
incubator. Entrepreneurship is baked into 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.
"I don't see anything improper in it,"
said Motwani. "The IITs are doing the right thing. They have to jumpstart
the process. 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."
Despite 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," said Ananth. "But you must maintain the academic
environment. The university is a place where you look for unity in concepts."
And it's also a place where young students
hope to change the world.
The Tenet Group
Whatever tension may exist on a theoretical
level at the IITs 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 than what you might find on Sand
Hill Road.
Rather than trying to build the next Yahoo
or Google, hoping 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 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.
"India was dormant," said Jhunjhunwala.
"Now it's growing. But the rural areas are being left behind."
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.
She has about 20 job centers in rural India,
employing about 60 people.
"It's the best for everyone involved,"
said Desi Crew. "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 attests, their
dreams are big: "Doubling per-capital rural GDP of India" and "Building
a few Billion Dollar Telecom Product Companies in India."
Bay Area support
One 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 from. In its place is
a wide-ranging and successful IIT diaspora to draw from.
In the Bay Area, groups like the Indus Entrepreneurs
and Pan IIT have formed to help Indian startups stateside and in India. They
offer practical advice and even venture capital in some instances.
"Successful IIT graduates in the U.S.
want to do something to give back," said Monishi Sanyal, an IIT class
of '70 graduate who is the CEO of Intersoft Corp., a software firm in Santa
Clara.
"I paid 25 rupees a month for my education,"
said Sanyal. That comes out to about 50 cents. "I have to give something
back."
Sanyal was instrumental in creating the Pan
IIT group, which serves as a meeting place for alums.
"Many of us have seen the way the best
universities and businesses in the world work," added Dilip Venkatachari,
a Google executive who went to IIT and is also active in Pan IIT. "When
we were going to school it was a little more noble but less practical. People
have gotten a lot more realistic about what can be done.
"It's getting to be more like Silicon
Valley over there."
Indeed, in Chennai, Jhunjhunwala sees his
vision being realized.
"Innovation happens when three types
get together," said Jhunjhunwala, visibly enthused. "A professor,
an experienced businessperson ... and a student who does not know it can't
be done."
E-mail Alan T. Saracevic at asaracevic@sfchronicle.com
