Understand how India turns ideas into unicorns. Inspiration is guaranteed!

Ten years ago, Indian parents wanted their kids to become doctors or engineers. Today they want them to start a company. The wild numbers prove it: from 1 unicorn (a startup worth over $1 billion) in 2011 to 131 today. India is where innovation, commercialization and scale happen seamlessly -and fast. Join NICCI’s business delegation to India, 17-20 November, and see it for yourself.

Written by Trond Skundberg, NICCI

We are repeating the success
Ten years ago, Truls Berg and I cooperated guiding a group of Norwegian business leaders to Mumbai to see India’s innovation scene up close. That was just months before the entrepreneurship wave hit. Now, India has more than 200000 officially recognized startups. This November, we will re-visit a completely different innovation landscape in India. Truls now heads the leading innovation network; Open Innovation Lab of Norway – our innovation partner for this year’s NICCI delegation.

-“None of us is as smart as all of us,” is Truls Berg and his networks philosophy. 
This is exactly what you will experience on our 4-days business program in Mumbai and Goa. 

-Be inspired by India’s giant state research network, the kind of place that fosters co-innovation in everything from vaccines to satellites. Including players ranging from research, startups, government, investors – and maybe you?

-Connect with a major startup community, hear a unicorn story meet one of India´s largest funds (find out how they pick the next winners).

-We are also exploring academic entrepreneurship at an elite university incubator, very famous for delivering successful entrepreneurs. What is the secret? 

On a previous NICCI visit we met Kunal Bahl whose journey sums up Indias startup story… He started Snapdeal with a school friend and built it into one of India’s biggest ecommerce platforms. Then bigger competitors hit hard, and it struggled. He didn’t quit. He reinvested. Today he co-runs Titan Capital, one of India’s busiest startup investors. Fail. Rebuild. Back the next one. That’s the Indian startup story, in one man’s career. Let´s learn from that case.

Doing more with less – is a big thing
Let me introduce you to the Indian phenomenon, Jugaad. Grassroots innovation. Think of it as an everyday hack that take care of an immediate challenge with very limited resources available. A water pump powered by a bike is one example. In the less improvised end of the spectrum, it is called Frugal Innovation, but with the exact same thinking. A mindset that also helped India complete its Mars orbiter mission, for roughly one-tenth of the cost of NASA’s Mars mission, launched during the same period.

Do we Norwegians lack the natural mindset to focus fully on the core outcome? Jugaad strips away the non-essential instead of chasing the perfect spec. Further, do we understand the value of reusing existing assets or designing for local realities (different than the one we know)?

A lot of the innovation and startup activity is in digital tech. Is Jugaad still relevant? Yes, it is! For a decade I have discussed Jugaad innovation with my friend Serish Venkata Gandikota. Now he runs the Frugal AI Hub at Cambridge, advocating AI that works without giant budgets or giant data, using the exact same Jugaad instinct he had when I first met him. 

May be adapting to this mindset will help you make it in India (or anywhere else)?

On last year’s India delegation we visited the deep tech incubator of IIT Madras, and one thing struck our group: India doesn’t just invent. What gets invented gets built, sold and scaled. Super-fast. Let’s learn from it!

A final warning from me: Exploring innovation and super scaling in India can change how you look at your own organization. Your future decision making might be permanently improved.