Product development and India Companies

I am not very comfortable about what these top management people, from every company, are saying these days. Everybody is saying that we should do innovation. is that possible. Are, we Indians, actually groomed for innovation at all?

Currently Indian economy is growing at a pace of 9%. With its GDP of about $800 B, its the 4th largest Economy. Contribution of IT sector stood at around 4.5% in the last fiscal. Sramana Mitra has given some good numbers about this here - http://sramanamitra.com/2007/02/09/need-product-companies-for-indias-growth/

However question still looms large over Indian IT industry. Are we becoming innovation friendly? Certainly there have some laudable efforts in this direction but more needs to be done. We ave only one proto.in that brings people together. most of the companies like to work in service mode. Even the product companies here are working as poor cousins of their US counterpart.

How many products have been developed from scratch and built in India. I am talking about inception till support. Often I hear people in my office say that we need to prove ourselves to US management to get the "GOOD" work.

So called GOOD work comes in patches. At one en these companies are saying that we are coming to India because of the potential and on the other hand they feel that Indian need to prove themselves again and again.

NASSCOM puts IT/ITES revenues at 70B by 2009. That would be roughly around 6% of India's GDP. But i feel that these figures would need to be changed. Most of our IT industry is service based and appreciating rupee will have a major effect.

Unless until we start catering to India and start becoming independent of US Economy - i feel that days do not seem as rosy as they have been in past.

Yipee!!! I am claiming my "own" blog

Technorati Profile

So.. I complete my claim of my blog on Technorati. I hope that slowly it will help in increasing traffic to my blog.

:)

First Post Using Windows Live Writer

Lets accept it, howsoever we hate MS, it never stops from giving easy to user tools. They really seem to have excellent usability engineers.

Yes, they might have produced a buggy OS, but I believe more then 80% people use their OS. Yes, their products crash more often then other programs (MAC/Unix) - but then these OS do not have so many custom written applications. I would rather term it as trade-off.

This is an extremely easy to use application. Just connect to existing blogger A/C, edit existing posts on post new blogs.

Cool.. :)

Reason for this post : when will get more such companies who create such easy to use and aesthetically appealing and affordable (Compare with mac) products?

Are Indians really equipped to be entrepreneurs?

I know that some will be really stumped by this question. After all- Ambanis, Mittal, Tata, NRN - all have come from India.

But the problem is that such people can be counted on fingers. Many articles/blogs have been written on this topic. Still I feel that nobody of us really touching the crux of the problem.

Am I an expert in this area? May be not, still i will try to pitch in with my 5 cents.

I will try to dive into the education system of India vis a vis Indian Parents.

Before that, here is a very good link on Entrepreneurship : http://www.getmotivation.com/goals/goals_grblairentrepreneur.html. I really like the portion where it says, "Entrepreneurship implies a willingness to risk challenging conventional wisdom and prevailing approaches."

If we look at our education system - this is exactly what we are lacking. Most of our education is towards imparting text book based education where challenging the conventional wisdom either does not happen or happens very randomly.

In India - failure is still considered bad (Well - it may be). Parents cant even think about seeing their wards failing. One has to trade in tried and tested waters. These days Computers/Software is hot and everybody has to follow in these footsteps. If someone has a good job, he/she should stick to the same job/profile. Resistance is faced from multiple directions if someone wants to do something which is not a norm.

If this is the ecosystem, how can we have more entrepreneurs? May be we need to talk about entrepreneurship from early in the education. Risk/Failure should be not be seen as something that will put one's career on a back burner. It should be seen as career enhancement. We need to talk about opportunities rather then failure.

What is an Ecosystem

An ecosystem is a natural unit consisting of all plants, animals and micro organisms in an area functioning together with all the non living physical factors of the environment.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem

This blog will try to find about the product Ecosystem in India. As I get more and more serious about stating my own venture, it appears that I need to know so many things before I start on my own.

Hence this blog.