Realistic efforts + innovation = Tomorrow’s venture success

 Dr B K Mukhopadhyay

(The author is a Professor of Management and Economics, formerly at IIBM (RBI) Guwahati. He can be contacted at m.bibhas@gmail.com)

 It is now well known that Tata Motors has earned the global distinction of being the most innovative [vide BCG Survey on Top 50 Innovative Companies]. Side by side, it remains a fact that most organizations want to achieve growth through innovation but fail because their processes, culture, and approaches trap them into incremental innovation. The question now arises: can large enterprises be faster at engaging with innovative technologies? It would be a powerful competitive advantage for those who figured it out. Who’ll be first? Let us search for the answers.

Creating more business and more jobs through fast-growing, innovative firms is one of the key objectives of any economy. As things stand now, there is a crucial need to support innovation in existing companies while at the same time creating new business opportunities. The vital ingredients in fostering entrepreneurial activities are to be located, which could accelerate resource flow—finance and management in particular—targeting enhancing business skills.

It is a well-known fact today that innovation and entrepreneurship are strong vectors to overcome global societal challenges. The need is there for placing a strong emphasis on developing the next generation of young entrepreneurs, encouraging and supporting individuals and companies to develop innovative ideas and take them to market, thus contributing to a more innovative and competitive environment.

The crucial need is there to analyse and provide entrepreneurs with information on ongoing facts and circumstances, experiences gained over time, and a road map for creating high-quality and successful entrepreneurs. The very task is to foster innovative entrepreneurship, to help overcome the PEST [political, economic, social, and technological] impediments and mindset restrictions in this arena, and to share experience with the successful ventures participating in the process and thus help them scale up their businesses, thus fostering the development of new businesses and widening specialised business support that is committed to reinforcing the young ventures, especially.

In addition, the techniques of resource generation and principles for funding, monitoring, and evaluating projects are required to be scanned, and detailed information must be shared as to how to forge ahead, encompassing risk management strategies and aspects. Creating a wider opportunity to interact with real management experts could help share knowledge.

In such a process, the very steps required for decreasing the average time to market of innovations emerge to be very crucial: accelerating the time to market of innovations through demonstration actions, facilitating experience labs, and demand-side measures.

In order to tackle this gap in entrepreneurial mindset, the knowledge bank has to contribute to the task of creating a more favourable environment in an economy for talent and entrepreneurship-driven innovation to flourish. One of the major challenges on this score is to achieve a shift in the perception and recognition of entrepreneurs in this fast-changing global environment.

This necessarily calls for exchanging views and experiences by encompassing individuals with an outstanding record of excellence in entrepreneurial, innovative, and financial enterprises based on mutual inspiration and dialogue in the field of entrepreneurship and innovation between academicians, top-level entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs-to-be, and other stakeholders, industry, and government institutions.

Thus, the very mission has to be: contributing to the process of enhancing sustainable growth and competitiveness; reinforcing the innovation capacity; and creating the entrepreneurs of tomorrow and preparing for the next innovative breakthroughs. The aim is to boost the innovation process from idea to product, from product to market, from student to entrepreneur, and from minnows to biggies. This is why boosting and encouraging individuals, academicians, and companies to embrace innovation and take it to market has to remain a top priority now, especially as far as the developing world is concerned.

Side by side, considering the state of mediocre knowledge prevailing with a section of so-called trainers, sharing the ongoing facts and circumstances with present-day entrepreneurs will help the former acquire firsthand knowledge about reality, the hurdles, and the future growth areas. In turn, from the real experts in the related field, the entrepreneurs will be able to boost their knowledge level as to the latest management principles and thoughts, which will help them to handle the problem areas, get further motivated, and look forward to a rosy picture in a globalised environment.

By connecting business and academic research, businesses stand to gain as they seek fresh opportunities to commercialise the most up-to-date and relevant research findings, with the aim of giving the economy a comparative advantage in the latest technological and non-technological fields as well as in open innovation. In return, academic institutions will benefit from additional resources, enhanced networking capacity, and new research perspectives stressing interdisciplinary approaches in areas of strong societal and economic importance.

So, such initiatives will try to integrate all three sides of the knowledge triangle (update deduction, research, and business). The integration of all three sides and the effective transmission and sharing of knowledge, information, and skills for joint exploration will be crucial to delivering the good and open further growth opportunities that economies like India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, among others, have been desperately seeking. Inasmuch as academicians and present and future entrepreneurs, if they continue working in isolation, it will be much less effective in delivering the results needed as demanded by global markets and forward-looking consumers in the days to come.

By adding higher managerial inputs into the mix, businesses will be able to take advantage of a workforce with skills tailored to their needs so as to be able to drive their market share ahead. Side by side, learners will benefit from an education that will make them more attractive to future employers and also more apt at contributing to the development of those employers’ businesses.

This, in turn, will help entrepreneurs translate their ideas into successful businesses by getting support for technology, market assessment, access to human resources, mentoring, and finance, while at the same time developing a clear strategy towards the penetration of overseas markets, breaking the existing fragmentation around national markets, and overcoming the entrepreneurs latent fear of moving abroad.

It has rightly been assessed that without the dogged persistence and patient work of all these people—nothing innovative would ever penetrate into large corporations—there have been an astounding number of barriers to adopting anything new. Still, big businesses in particular have the most to win because they can scale productivity gains across their global platforms. Getting through the many corporate barriers to innovation is a feat, obvious enough!!

The upshot is to explore excellence in business, education, entrepreneurship, and research for world-class innovation. In view of making this operational, an integrated partnership composed of businesses, entrepreneurs, universities, research institutes, and technology centres will produce new innovation models and inspire others to emulate them.