Said Business School

Said Business School (prounced: saeed), Oxford University, hosts a programme which funds social entrepreneurs who are motivated to bring substantial changes in the society with the entrepreneurial venture. I was amazed to find so many of them are focussed on India. The first one was from Shashank Verma a Indian software engineer who left his career to pursue MBA at Oxford, where he described his case study on the development of bio fuel in India. His idea was accepted, funded and is now called Clean Star Energy, which has plantations across Maharashtra and is a growing organization. The second one was from Dhruv Lakra, who left his career of investment banking to work with fishermen folks in southern India to help them organize their business, and eventually went ahead to become a skoll scholar at Oxford. He is now the founder and CEO of Mirakle Couriers Ltd, a courier company based out of Mumbai which employs deaf people. His idea is to bring them into mainstream job and to prove that deaf people are actually capable of running an organization. The employees of Mirakle couriers use sign language to perform their everyday tasks. Men does the delivery work, and women does the official and administrative work. Apart from these two there were several ideas like starting and managing a fund which invests in the supply chain management to the farming system in India. A training academy for principals and senior teachers at the rural government run primary schools, so that they can learn and employ the best practices in their school which educates the future of the nation. These are some of the brilliant ideas from the graduate students of Oxford, and this is what the country exactly needs from its young minds.

Indian tech companies focus more on training

The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business hosted the India Economic Forum in 2009 to discuss where India is headed in the times of the economic uncertainty. Held at Philadelphia, the program attracted a number of Indian leaders, CEOs, investors, heads of non profit organizations, sport persons and bollywood celebrities. The program denoted the stong impact of the country in the era of globalization and need of the world to acknowledge the fact. Vivek Wadhwa, former silicon valley enterpreneur and now a professor and researcher at the Wharton, stressed that its time US should start actually learning from India. The guru should start learning from the disciple. His remark was based on his conclusion from research about the innovation of management of the Indian tech companies. According to him, The fact that they spent a huge amount of money and time in training their employees is the fact that sets them apart. Its a mandate in the premier tech companies in India to undergo a fixed hours of training at all levels every year, and these initiatiatives are directly linked with the year end performance appraisals. The Indian companies' huge focus on training and career development within the the existing workforce, is what sets them apart from the rest.

This is also true with the tech startups in the silicon valley which according to his research in 2005, 25 % of all start ups were by immigrants of which Indians were by far the largest . It contributed to 52 billion in yearly profits and generated jobs for 450,000 Americans. Focus on education, training, personal development, innovation and research within the company and investing in the people is the USP and the value proposition at the end of the day for the Indian entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship in Rajasthan

Bangalore, Mumbai, Gurgaon are few Indian cities famous in the global business map, and the hotspots of outsourced IT. A new entry to the list is Jaipur. Backed a team of local businessmen, Rajasthan born Silicon valley entrepreneur Naren Bakshi is all set to make Jaipur as the next IT hub of India. A place where computers were banned in the year 2002, and where women cant work after sunset, Bakshi and his team deserves the credit to bring a paradigm shift in the government mentality and management of the state. Laws has been altered, goals has been defined, a new era has dawned in Rajasthan with the emergence of technology companies. Genpact, a tech company which operates 24x7, opened up its offices, and so did Duetsche Bank. Industry stalwarts like Narayan Murthy of Infosys and Anand Mahindra of Mahindra & Mahindra have shown serious interest and discussed with the state government regarding the future developments of the sun basked state. The government now sends officials to silicon valley regularly, for drawing experience and gathering knowledge to set up an environment which facilitates the growth of technology companies in the state. With an ambitious young population and a willing government, the pink city Jaipur is all set to position itself in the global outsourcing map.