By IANS
Chennai : Only through entrepreneurship and not doles can a country alleviate poverty, said C.K. Prahalad, India-born global management guru.
Speaking at the launch of T.S. Srinivasan Chair Professorship of Entrepreneurship at city-based Great Lakes Institute of Management for Entrepreneurship by TVS Capital Funds Ltd here Wednesday, Prahalad said: “Entrepreneurship in India could be divided into three phases.
“The first phase was after the country’s independence and up till 1990. The second phase is from 1990 when India opened its doors and the third phase is when Indian companies started acquiring overseas companies.”
While India missed the first phase owing to the licence control regime, he said opening the doors for multinationals in 1990 was not globalisation as the doors were opened for imports into India and not exports.
According to him, the India-centric second wave of entrepreneurship saw the emergence of domestic IT and pharmaceutical players using the Indian cost advantage and oriented totally towards exports while others fought the increased competition.
The third wave is what is seen now – Indian companies acquiring companies overseas.
“Days are not far off when nearly 60 percent of some Indian company’s turnover would be contributed by their overseas operations.”
According to Prahalad, the next wave is to use globalisation to transform Indian entrepreneurship.
“In the 60s, business leaders like T.S. Srinivasan fought bottlenecks and regulations and not the markets. During the last 15 years businessmen fought competitive deficiencies within India – lack of quality perspective, infrastructure and others.”
Now the fight is for global dominance fighting on scale and quality parameters, he said.
India has an edge over China as it is developing soft infrastructure – knowledge base and skill sets.
“We should strive to see that there is uniformity in education across the country at the school level instead of focusing on higher education.”
Gopal Srinivasan, chairman of TVS Capital, said: “The chair will ensure entrepreneurship as a concept and model is fully understood at the management level.”
The company has set up the Chair of Professorship on Entrepreneurship donating Rs.12 million.
The activities conducted by the chair would be twofold: academic research and industry-oriented dissemination of learning by way of teaching, training and management consulting.
Addressing the gathering from the US through video, Bala V. Balachandran, founder and honorary dean of Great Lakes Institute of Management, said that entrepreneurship was at the heart of economic growth of any nation and India should nurture entrepreneurs in large numbers.