can bangalore become the “innovation capital”of india
TRANSCRIPT
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Can Bangalore become the “innovation capital”of India?
I attended an event organized by VCCircle for entrepreneurs today in Bangalore and came away with
quite a few learnings from the discussions.
The day started with a keynote by Srivatsa Krishna – the secretary of IT for Karnataka and it was an
impressive opening. His vision is to move Bangalore from being the IT capital of India to the
Innovation capital and he talked about how he wants to go about that. For one, he is very gung-ho
about this which itself was refreshing. His strategy is to ensure more startups from Bangalore with
software and biotech being obvious areas.
One thing that stuck me was that while it is common for people in the IT in Bangalore to say that the
industry grew despite the government, steps are actually being taken by the government to aid it
constructively. Some of the steps taken that Mr. Krishna spoke about were: allocating 1 acre of land
on long-term lease free to companies that promised jobs for 1000 people; allowing engineering
students in the third or fourth year to take a break and be involved in a startup without being penalised
for it; and setting up a startup fund to seed ideas. His talk was full of interesting titbits such as:
• there are over 10000 biotech professionals in Bangalore
• the animation and special effects for Hollywood movies Life of Pi and Skyfall were created in
Namma Bengaluru
• After Silicon Valley, Bangalore has the second largest IT cluster globally
It was good to see a government official speak with so much energy and one who with a vision –
hopefully he will be able to implement it successfully too!
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The keynote was followed by an interesting panel discussion featuring Sudhir Sethi, IDG, Prashant
Prakash, Accel Partners and Srivatsa Krishna. It was a healthy debate on what the government and
VC firms could do to stimulate the startup culture in Karnataka. What stood out starkly is the reduction
in seed funding in Bangalore and it appears that it is on the rise in the NCR region. The general
consensus was that seed funding had to be more significant for the “Innovation capital” dream to be
realized. In India, VC funding is more than seed funding whereas in the US, seed funding is six times
more VC funding!
A couple of other areas that need to be addressed are the lack of intellectual mentoring for startups
and insufficiency of talent to sustain an innovation culture. It appears that the ecosystem exists but it
is not yet fully leveraged for various reasons and still needs to mature lot more. However, things are
happening and provided that sustains, am not sure if we will become the innovation capital soon
enough, but we can certainly move closer to that dream.
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