Innovation - The Spice of Entrepreneurship

From left to right: Debadutta Upadhyaya, MD & CEO, Timesaverz, Sanjam Sahi Gupta, President, WISTA India & Director, Sitara Shipping Pvt Ltd, Ashish Jhalani, Founder, e-Tailing India and Alok Ranjan, Strategic Advisor, Young Biz Times, at Business Standard Smart Business in Mumbai on 5th April 2014, in association with Young Biz Times, Mumbai.

 

If you are planning to start a new business, it is important that the product or service is innovative. Also, a budding entrepreneur should not be afraid of failure. In fact, Indians should learn to celebrate failures as they turn out to be the stepping stone to success.

The support of family & friends is a must for starting any new business. One has to keep in mind that venture capitalists and accelerator programmes are the best help to scale up the businesses.

These were the few topics discussed in the seminar on “Innovation – the spice of entrepreneurship”, held by Business Standard Smart Business in association with Young Biz Times at Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management. It was moderated by Dev Chatterjee, Associate Editor, Business Standard.

The CEOs, most of who started new businesses, say this is the right time to launch new products and services in India due to huge demand for online products and services. The success of Flipkart, Snapdeal and Localbania are few examples. “Any service that makes people lazy like home delivery of products and services has a huge potential,” says Upadhyaya.

"India is definitely awakening as far as support system for new businesses is concerned. The family structure and many individuals are now coming forward to support start-ups," says she.

Sanjam Sahi Gupta said India does have the eco system for starting new businesses but it is more of a "jugaad" type of system. "There is a lot of potential in India and we should look beyond our limitations. It's the limitations which pushes us forward to innovate. There are many positives in the country," she says.

E-Tailing Founder, Jhalani, said there are many accelerators and incubator programmes which are helping the new entrepreneurs to set up businesses and innovate.

Alok Ranjan said the eco-system in India is still not comparable with the US. "Indian entrepreneurs need to open up more. We need to learn how to market ideas to the venture capitalists and expand those ideas on the global scale," said he.