Foreword
Getting there from here
It was the depth of ‘the Great Depression’ in western Oklahoma; there was nothing but dust blowing for as far as you could see. One family decided that it was time to hunt for greener pastures, packed all their possessions and headed for Arkansas. While searching for a particular farm that was for sale, the family became lost and needed directions, so they asked a young man if he knew the way. ‘Yep’, he replied, ‘You go down this road to the second fork, then turn left, and … No. Go to the third turnoff and then go right … No, that won’t get there, neither. Try going back about a mile, then turn left at the lake, go … No. Mister, I don’t think you can get there from here. You’re gonna have to start from somewhere else.’
The story of India’s future successes could hardly have been predicted even 20 years ago. There was little to promote a vibrant economy when faced with overwhelming challenges, deficits and poverty. Weighed down by bureaucracy and the remnants of colonial domination it would have been difficult to chart a way forward for India to deliver some hope for success for this giant community. It would have been reasonable to say, ‘you can’t get there from here’.
As children in a developed country we were reminded to eat our food and remember the poor children in India as my parents reflected on their own experience of being wartime refugees from Europe. But despite this Indian legacy of trouble, a few sparks of creativity and determination began. What emerged somewhat improbably was the rise of a class of the Indian entrepreneur.
The most commonly articulated motivation for those who have been successful entrepreneurs is a desire (and plan) to ‘change the world’. As individuals, these empowered people go about their business of breaking routine, challenging collective wisdom and building new realities. Their energies are not normally planned and their actions are geared to show that what if, hypothetically, the best and brightest of a huge country such as India believed that the imposed constraints of poverty and poor infrastructure were not immovable and unyielding to change. What if they, emboldened by the same entrepreneurial beliefs, started to change their own world and create their own realities?
Indian entrepreneurs developed world-leading businesses in the world’s highest growth, value-adding industries.
What if these same entrepreneurs could build on their own successes and leverage their entrepreneurial assets and processes by engaging Indian social and human capital and applying it more broadly? What would be the impact if this community of highly educated and motivated individuals went beyond these new industries where they have found success? What spectacular results might emerge when this much brainpower and energy engages with that much opportunity and need? What if the sheer scale of opportunity that India represents and the scope of this massive human resource could be harnessed to become a powerful transformative force for innovation?
India is a raucous and vigorous democracy. The world will see India regaining its historical mantle maintained over a long history to again be responsible for 20 per cent of world economic output over the next 20 years. Its freewheeling inventiveness and opportunistic pragmatism have now been unleashed on a world hungry for what India has to offer. Now India is hungry to consume and develop for itself.
George Mathew traces the steps of how India is ‘getting there from here’.
Not only does he document the unprecedented and essential role that innovation has in working around the atrophied commercial lifelines of the economy, he looks at what might work even better: how India can become a superpower in innovation.
George explains that he had an epiphany when he realised the impact that an innovation system could have, nurturing innovation for inclusive economic growth. What this can become – if designed, prioritised and funded well – is a solution for grassroots development, national growth and global competitiveness.
I had the good fortune to study at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford in California and also work at Yahoo! in Silicon Valley. America has a well-recognised capacity to fire the imagination and create aspirational models. America celebrates its heroes … and in Silicon Valley, many of these heroes were Indian immigrants and members of TiE (the Indus Entrepreneurs).
Where did these individuals come from? What made them succeed and what elements fired their hunger and ability to outperform so many others? India itself appeared (at least at a distance) to be a nation struggling with a huge burden of poverty, a massive weight of population, and a broken, creaking and calcified infrastructure.
Yet after studying and working with so many people from this community, I quickly grew to recognise both a set of values and a determination to succeed that were very familiar to me, as my own parents had been part of that generation of Jewish refugees who had survived Europe, building new lives and businesses in new communities.
Years later, I also had the opportunity to meet George, who is not only a practitioner with Infosys but also both a historian and a keen observer of human behaviour. Infosys itself is something of a crucible of the Indian innovation story, being a role model and training ground for so many others. Starting from the most humble of beginnings, Infosys and the entrepreneurs who founded the company rose to become the key player in the global IT services industry. George has lived this narrative in real time and continues to contribute to the Infosys success story.
He will share with you an objective assessment of the core pillars and institutions of India that have brought it to this point. He examines the ‘tipping points’ of India’s history, its struggles after independence, its accidents as well as its design. He also thrashes out part of the inevitable moral dilemma that Indian society wrestles with in terms of poverty and successes and how one-third of India’s population live on under a dollar a day. He explains the dynamic role that innovation is playing by lifting India out of its poverty trap and the crucial role it is playing by reshaping India’s future both domestically and internationally. He calls for the creation of an Indian National Innovation System to help transform India and assist in a more equitable distribution of the benefits that can be gained from such economic development.
But more importantly in this book you will also discover George’s talent for story-telling, as he navigates through the story behind the emotionally powerful transformation that India has gone through and how the country is becoming a model for innovation amongst all nations – a superpower in the world of innovation.