{"id":10671,"date":"2011-10-10T04:10:45","date_gmt":"2011-10-10T04:10:45","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-10-10T04:10:45","modified_gmt":"2011-10-10T04:10:45","slug":"Where-is-India-s-Steve-Jobs-","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=10671","title":{"rendered":"Where is India\u2019s Steve Jobs?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Thursday, the Economic Times published an anguish-ridden interview of the jury that had deliberated over this year\u2019s winners of the newspaper\u2019s corporate excellence awards. \u201c[W]hen do we become a nation that\u2019s known for cutting edge innovation?\u201d Anand Mahindra, the managing director of Mahindra & Mahindra, said. Kumar Mangalam Birla, chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, bemoaned the inhospitable environment for innovation in India. Deepak Parekh, chairman of HDFC, said: \u201cWe have the fire in the belly\u2026 But we do not have venture funds investing the way they do it in Silicon Valley.\u201d No overt mention was made of a particular entrepreneur who had died the previous day, but his shadow seemed to pose the same question, reframed only slightly: Can India produce a Steve Jobs? Perhaps this is a hollow, even narcissistic, question. Brazil hasn\u2019t produced a Steve Jobs; neither has China, the Philippines, Zambia, Australia or any one of dozens of countries around the world. We cannot even be certain that America \u201cproduced\u201d Jobs, in the sense that a factory produces an automobile, by processing a load of raw material into a finished specimen; Jobs may have been entirely sui generis and only coincidentally American. But I put the question anyway to Aditya Dev Sood, the founder and chief executive of the Center for Knowledge Societies, a consulting firm that works in what may be considered Jobs\u2019 pet areas: user experience design and innovation management.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The question of innovation has been weighing particularly heavily on Mr. Sood\u2019s mind because, later this week in Bangalore, his firm will host Design Public, a conference on innovation and the public interest. Mr. Sood\u2019s first thought, unsurprisingly, concerned the Indian education system, \u201cwhich prepares us for society by a series of instrumental grading mechanisms that treat us like chickens in a hatchery.\u201d This is, he contended, a legacy of colonization, and although Thomas Babington Macaulay\u2019s infamous Minute of 1835 is now deep in India\u2019s past, it still lays out colonial sentiments on education vividly. Macaulay, who served on the Indian governor-general\u2019s Council of India between 1834 and 1838, presented his Minute as part of discussions leading up to a reform of English education in India. Macaulay saw education in India as fit only for \u201cconveying knowledge to the great mass of the population,\u201d and he decried scholars who \u201cwho live on the public while they are receiving their education, and whose education is so utterly useless to them that, when they have received it, they must either starve or live on the public all the rest of their lives.\u201d Macaulay\u2019s views fitted the principles of colonial governance, Mr. Sood said: \u201cThey needed people to run around and man the arms of the state, not to propel the economy forward. We still haven\u2019t reformed that system of education.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other great bugbear of entrepreneurship in India has been what Mr. Sood calls the country\u2019s \u201csocialist flirtation,\u201d which stifled the creativity of individuals and corporate houses. That flirtation ended in 1991, and Mr. Sood has sensed reasons for optimism since then. \u201cThe fact that Steve Jobs\u2019 death made such big news in India shows that young people are seeing themselves in him,\u201d he said. \u201cTo be that brashly innovative, and to expect that kind of world-remaking success \u2013 people expect that in this generation.\u201d But innovation, in this case, can be defined too narrowly, as a particularly Jobsian focus on high-end consumer technology and sleek capitalism. True innovation must involve making the most impressive use of a common resource. For Jobs, that resource has been the high density of technologists in Silicon Valley, while in India, that resource is inexpensive labor. To convert this labor into a company with the stature of Infosys is also a form of innovation, even if it seems to hew closely to what Mr. Mahindra told the Economic Times: \u201cWe think like a sweat shop.\u201d (In his quoted comments, Mr. Mahindra mentioned only one recent technology innovator from India: Sabeer Bhatia, the inventor of Hotmail, although Mr. Bhatia did his innovating while he was based in the United States.) Mr. Sood also suggested that innovation is defined by the canny identification of a market. The market that Jobs exploited \u2013 a thick layer of consumers who would spend several hundred dollars on a cell phone, and who wouldn\u2019t think twice about paying 99 cents for a song \u2013 exists in India only in an infant state. Instead, however, there are millions of people in the lower reaches of the pyramid, for whom cost and utility are irreparably intertwined. In this market, innovation looks different: It looks like the Tata Nano, or like CavinKare\u2019s shampoo-in-a-sachet, or like Godrej\u2019s ChotuKool refrigerator. Does a country need to cross a certain economic threshold \u2013 reduce poverty to a certain level among its citizens \u2013 before its technological creativity is channeled into high-end consumerism? Mr. Sood thought this a possibility, and said that he was already seeing that shift in India.<\/strong><\/p>\n

SOURCE<\/a>
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