The other day I was reading an article on Rediff, “Why can’t Indians build a great product in India?“. It got me thinking about the scale of impact that strategies like seed funding in micro-enterprises can have on innovation in India. In my opinion, backoffice outsourcing (to India) has actually paralyzed the innovation model in India. It has made the ‘think tanks’ lazy.
The iAccelerator programme from the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (an IIM Ahmedabad endeavor) brought a ray of hope. The programme is touted as a YCombinator clone (in India), but going through their guidelines makes me laugh. The whole concept doesn’t reflect a sense of seriousness and technical inclination. Ah well, maybe a perfect seed funding model in India (or Australia for that matter) is nothing but wishful thinking for now.