What a great (and scary) idea that the Indians are proposing here:
“Imagine over 350,000 engineers pass out every year hoping to get jobs and according to industry bodies only over 20% are employable. That’s a real challenge. Now imagine this. We create a startup that is built on a principle of open innovation. Every year we throw up a 1000 ideas that we can see are gaps from internet to telecommunications and finance to healthcare for global markets including that in India. We then throw open this opportunity on an annual basis to 400,000 students including professionals who work across industries in India to collaborate on these ideas (and they can do the opposite or their own). We then connect them to mentors and investors of time and capital and they have just 3 months to plan and prototype their ideas or technologies or businesses. The ones who make it through are ready and then we have a portfolio of over 200 companies (assume 80% die) annually to take to the next step.
So now people don’t have to have only one option, to just look for jobs.They can become wealth creators and this way we can kick start global innovation out of India. We can connect these ideas and startups to other clusters of innovation, ideas, investors and markets and other opportunities to collaborate and we have a pretty powerful opportunity here.
Even if these 400,000 students invest $100 each we then raise over $40m a year VC fund from their own fraternity and those who don’t start continue to participate as investors in people whose ideas have survived the Darwinism! This also means on an average every one of these startups get to over $200,000 seed fund from their fellow alumni and social networks. Here is an opportunity to create wealth for all.
If we do this annually we create wealth, jobs, opportunities and more importantly help make India very competitive as a nation for the next 100 years and in the process leapfrog and leverage all the good work that the services companies inIndia have done over the last 20 years.This also means that instead of doing engineering or masters projects just for academic sake and a must do, now people have the opportunity to go to the next level.
What’s the worst case? There isn’t one. People learn so much they become good enough anyway to get a job and employable from day one. What’s the best case? We create billion dollar global companies year on year and then there is no stopping the great talent that India and the world has.The idea? Democratize innovation and investing bottom up….and may a thousand Talpiots, Stanfords and IITs bloom.”
Sounds great, but excluding open source software and a few other products, the problem persists as to how to actually coordinate 350,000 people in an online environment to faciliate development. This will come in time when technologies will faciliate the tools required for all types of different products to be developed, tested and prototyped virtually. Perhaps such an undertaking should be part of the broader framework of offline group collaboration such as IBM Developerworks (for which they rejected my application!) or the Elgg movement. I have my own ideas how we can improve online collaborations which I will reveal in a later post.
Post stolen from: http://blog.nasscom.in/emerge/2007/11/06/part-2-and-an-open-business-plan-bottom-up-lets-unleash-creative-destruction/
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