Bangalore :
Gururaj ‘Desh’ Deshpande is an Indian American investor, best known for cofounding Sycamore Networks and the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT in the US. In Bangalore, he co-founded Tejas Networks. Three years ago, US President Barack Obama appointed him co-chair of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. For those new to this space, he is related to Infosys’ N R NarayanaMurthy (his and Murthy’s wives are sisters ), and it is said that Deshpande used to be introduced as Murthy’s brother-in-law in India, and vice-versa in the US. Deshpande spoke exclusively to TOI on a visit to Bangalore on Thursday:
How do you see the immigration debate in the US?
The US wants highly talented people to be part of its economy. When we went to the US in the ’70s, we didn’t have that many opportunities to come back. Now, a lot of people going there for education are not staying back and the US is getting to the point where their education is the best in the world and they are not benefiting from it. They are pro-immigration for highly talented people. But there are also 20 million illegal immigrants in US, hence there’s this big debate about granting citizenship to immigrants.
You advise Obama on innovation and entrepreneurship. How is that initiative going?
Innovation is as important in the US as it is in India. In the US, for the last 15 years, 5 lakh new companies have started every year, generating 4 million new jobs each year. This has happened independent of slowdowns . The only way to solve the long-term problem is to create more jobs and take it to 8 or 10 million. The question is how do you get startups and how do you bring them up to speed? We cameup with a policy on how to generate ideas, promote entrepreneurship and provide access to capital. The key message that applies to India also is that government should not be in the game of picking winners and losers. They should explore co-investing opportunities or give tax breaks to angel investors and VCs.
What is your assessment of the startup ecosystem in India?
I’m excited. Sometimes in India people’s expectation goes out of hand. People think that they can create entrepreneurship by building infrastructure and incubators. It doesn’t happen. It happens only by people actively engaging in it. The best policy is, you let a lot of people play and not pick the winners and losers. It’s like having a cricket team with a lot of street cricket. Once you have big platforms, you have good people coming to it.
You’ve set up what you call a Social Innovation Sandbox to nurture social enterprise and innovation in the Hubli-Dharwad region. How is that going?
If impact is what you desire, you have to get connected to real problems. If you want social innovation to happen, you have to have a deep understanding of the problem itself and then to solve it. You need new ideas that needn’t be patentable and looking for huge competitive advantage. Relevance is the most important piece in social innovation. We have 10,000 college students in Hubli-Dharwad doing about 2,000 projects. You’re using society as a lab. Even if 3-4 % of them become entrepreneurs and employ 10 or 100 people, it’s a huge booster to the economy. When you bring execution excellence to the compassion of the non-profit , magic happens. Ratan Tata was a part of the Sandbox last year. I met him in Mumbai recently and he said he wants to do something similar. Ratan is motivated to solve huge problems . He thinks Akshaya Patra can scale from feeding 1.2 million to 100 million.
source: http://www.articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> Tech> Enterprise IT> Entrepreneurship / by Shilpa Padnis & Sujit John, TNN / August 09th, 2013