The Hindu Business Line : ‘Innovations must add value to be effective’

Ahmedabad, Dec. 19 Entrepreneurship has little to do with availability of social capital and more to do with an organisation’s internal culture, said Mr Ajit Balakrishnan, Founder, Chairperson and Managing Director, Rediff.com, at the eighth Entrepreneurship and Creativity Forum at the Mudra Institute of Communication.

“Yahoo lost out to Google in the battle for search engines even though they had discovered it first.

The small decision of placing the search box on the bottom rather than on top due to differences in the organisation became the defining factor,” he said.

Similarly, voice to text algorithm is the next jump in digital media and companies such as TCS and Infosys are capable of innovating in it. “But they will not do so as it will destroy their revenue streams by making the call centre industry redundant,” he said. He added that innovations had nothing to do with being radical. They will only be effective if they are able to offer new features in the same set-up.

“When cars were first invented in Britain, they were marketed as ‘horseless carriages’ because nobody wanted to buy a ‘car’,” he said. Sometimes innovation takes place gradually and without intention, as in the case of the car phone that evolved into the mobile phone and is today on the verge of replacing the computer. Ironically, some things such as the cure for malaria, ayurvedic herbs from the bark of a tree and modern synthetic medication co-exist.

Trust is vital

Mr Sergio Arzeni, Director, Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris, stressed the importance of trust in entrepreneurship. “I do not care about entrepreneurship if it is not a tool for creating jobs. Entrepreneurship should be taken out of management schools and taught in medical, physics, mathematics and other schools,” he said.

According to him, an economy loses its purpose if it increases inequalities in society.

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