Spring Break
India Unbound: A Perspective
Soura Bhattacharyya (OC), Sports Editor
Issue date: 2/12/07 Section: Viewpoints
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After the extensive coverage of South-East Asia in the previous edition of The Harbus, I figured I'd push my luck with yet another article on India. Not quite a conference coverage article, not exactly reminiscences about a trek, but probably somewhere in between.
(With due apologies to Gurcharan Das, author of "India Unbound", a book with quite an intense perspective on India's Nehruvian Socialistic past, and its future in the globalizing world.)
This train of thought started in the course of my one-month trip to India this winter, replete with friends, family and a bit of work, and was fuelled while attending a diverse set of panels at the recently concluded HBS India Conference. In contending with the question of when to return home to India, and what nature of opportunity to exploit there, the last couple of months have provided quite a few interesting perspectives.
In more recent memory, an interesting observation by the India Conference VC/PE Panel was the difference between product innovation, the more classical western view of creativity, versus go-to-market or business model innovation, which seemed to abound in India. One instance of this is the outsourcing and service delivery model that has traditionally been followed by IT services, but that has now transcended to auto ancillaries and pharmaceuticals. Medical tourism is another instance, with an increasing number of non-complicated elective surgeries being performed in centers such as Apollo and Wockhardt. With U.S. entrepreneurs quickly aligning with these care providers to create the service delivery model, this fledgling industry seems to be positioning itself to compete with established multi-specialty clinics in USA.
Another case in point that also came up for discussion in the VC/PE panel is the mobile services market, where service providers are building for capacity instead of coverage, and the overall cost dynamic of the industry is unlike any other seen in any OECD nation.
(With due apologies to Gurcharan Das, author of "India Unbound", a book with quite an intense perspective on India's Nehruvian Socialistic past, and its future in the globalizing world.)
This train of thought started in the course of my one-month trip to India this winter, replete with friends, family and a bit of work, and was fuelled while attending a diverse set of panels at the recently concluded HBS India Conference. In contending with the question of when to return home to India, and what nature of opportunity to exploit there, the last couple of months have provided quite a few interesting perspectives.
In more recent memory, an interesting observation by the India Conference VC/PE Panel was the difference between product innovation, the more classical western view of creativity, versus go-to-market or business model innovation, which seemed to abound in India. One instance of this is the outsourcing and service delivery model that has traditionally been followed by IT services, but that has now transcended to auto ancillaries and pharmaceuticals. Medical tourism is another instance, with an increasing number of non-complicated elective surgeries being performed in centers such as Apollo and Wockhardt. With U.S. entrepreneurs quickly aligning with these care providers to create the service delivery model, this fledgling industry seems to be positioning itself to compete with established multi-specialty clinics in USA.
Another case in point that also came up for discussion in the VC/PE panel is the mobile services market, where service providers are building for capacity instead of coverage, and the overall cost dynamic of the industry is unlike any other seen in any OECD nation.
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