Piyush Goyal's Call for Indian Innovation
08 Apr 2025 17:38:24
Ask, will it change the way people live/work? Will it impact people the world over?
Don’t shoot the messenger!
Especially when he is a very well qualified, well meaning and a change maker himself. Shri Piyush Goyal a sitting cabinet minister. He is pushing the envelope for a good reason.
Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal delivered a sharp critique of India’s startup ecosystem, highlighting its heavy focus on food delivery, betting, and fantasy sports apps, while contrasting it with China’s advancements in electric vehicles (EVs), battery technology, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence (AI).
Speaking at the Startup Maha Kumbh on Thursday, Goyal questioned whether the country was settling for low-paying gig jobs rather than striving for technological innovation. “Do we want to make ice cream or silicon chips? Are we just here for retail?" he asked, urging startups to pursue meaningful innovation.
There was lot of criticism on this remark but I feel he conveyed his point very aptly and appropriately. One must take his concern with some degree of seriousness.
I have heard his clip carefully and do not find any derogatory tinge to what he said. He is right and it his job to nudge the next generation of startups/innovators. Nothing wrong. I feel people from the so called ‘hallowed echo system’ must cull out the ideas from his talk and take it as a constructive suggestion rather than criticism. Do not forget he also along with his team has a lot of sweat equity and moolah equity at stake- he is the venture capitalist of the VCs.
Yes, in initial days you start with low hanging fruits but as we move in time you need to jump a bit higher to reach to higher branches of the tree. He is not asking to take a leap but move forward out of the comfort zone as quickly as possible. Remember India has to catch up on the lost time and we have no time to waste.
Let me say it loud and clear that in my thirty years of writing, penning down 45 books and more than four hundred articles I have always welcomed the suggestions/criticism of my editors- more than a dozen of them. I thank them for their concern as they do value addition to my work. At the end of the day, I want my book to be as flawless and readable as possible.
Observation is the key to innovation
Look for gaps and I normally look at the books in my area- read some to understand what others are saying. And then decide what I should write- can I bring a fresh idea to the table? This is the moot point.
In most rudiment observation on observation is when man observed a log rolling down a hill- eureka- he thought of a wheel! And wheel was invented for bullock carts and chariots.
Then he kept on reinventing the wheel till he came with rubber tyres, filled with air, nitrogen then tubeless tyres.
While various patents for tubeless tires existed, including one by Killen Tire in 1928 and Wingfoot Corporation (a Goodyear subsidiary) in 1944, many designs faced technical issues and saw limited production. Frank Herzegh, working for BF Goodrich, applied for a patent in 1946 and received US patent in 1952. The key advancement came with the use of butyl rubber, a synthetic rubber more resistant to air leakage than the natural rubber used in earlier designs. By the 1950s, tubeless tires, reinforced with alternating plies of cord, became standard equipment on new automobiles.
Cross breed innovation
In the West people were working on different areas simultaneously and there was may be adaptation of ideas from one vertical to the other. We must do that cross pollination.
One man shows
Let us not keep blaming the system or the echo system or the country. Lot many did a lot, created a lot, earned a lot and generated a lot of employment single handedly- working against odds. They had problems but never blamed others.
These guys ‘thought adventurously’. I don’t know how to define adventurous thinking but below examples prove this exists and maybe we lack it. Common sense thinking too.
The string trimmer was invented in the early 1970s by George Ballas of Houston, Texas, (when he was fifty year old) who conceived the idea while watching the revolving action of the cleaning brushes in an automatic car wash. His first trimmer was made by attaching pieces of heavy-duty fishing line to a tin can bolted to an edger. He called it the "Weed Eater” which was used world over for trimming grass. Net sales of his product rose from about $570,000 in 1972 to $41 million in 1976.
We need to generate ideas and that is the crux of it. Weed eater was a one man show- a bright idea based on need-based observation. So was AK -47 the dreaded automatic weapon. The initials AK represent Avtomat Kalashnikova, Russian for “automatic Kalashnikov,” for its designer, Mikhail Kalashnikov, in 1947. He was wounded in combat in October 1941 and hospitalised until April 1942. In the last few months of being in hospital, he overheard some fellow soldiers bemoaning their current rifles, which were plagued with reliability issues, such as jamming. As he continued to overhear the complaints that the Soviet soldiers had, as soon as he was discharged, he went to work on what would become the famous AK-47 assault rifle. You may like to watch movie,AK-47 a Russian biographical film about the experiences of Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle.
The first rolling suitcase was invented 50 years ago by Bernard D. Sadow, the former vice president of a Massachusetts luggage company. Sadow patented it in 1972 — and could be pulled around the airport by a strap.
Not only it led to an uptick in luggage demand for the suitcase industry but also to a total reconfiguration of overhead storage bins in order to accommodate the new design. Four-wheeled spinner luggage was next worldwide invention.
While exact annual sales figures for Post-it notes are not publicly released, 3M, the manufacturer, produces around 80 billion Post-it notes annually, and the global sticky note market is estimated to be worth around $2.4 billion.
Spencer Silver at 3M in US while developing a superstrong adhesive accidently created reusable low tack adhesive later used for POST IT NOTES. In 2010, the creators joined the National Inventors Hall of Fame as a result of the widespread success.
Automatic telephone exchange - Strowger, a small businessman, actually an undertaker- not an engineer- invented an automatic telephone exchange after he realised that the manual telephone exchange operators were deliberately interfering with his calls, leading to loss of business. Strowger swore to "get even" with the telephone operators and "put every last one of them out of a job- and he did.
Soichiro Honda founded Honda Motor Co., Ltd. on September 24, 1948, in Hamamatsu City.
Honda's first product to be sold on the market was the A-Type engine in 1947, known for its rotary disk valves and die-casting manufacturing method. In 1949, Honda introduced its first full-fledged motorcycle, the Dream D-Type, which was entirely designed and engineered by Honda, including the motorcycle body frames. Rest as they say is a history.
Before the assembly line thought out by Ford, building a car was a slow, labour-intensive process, requiring highly skilled craftsmen to complete the entire vehicle.
Ford's innovation was to move the work to the workers, rather than the workers moving to the work. He used a conveyor belt to move the chassis from one station to the next, where different workers performed specific tasks.
The assembly line dramatically reduced the time it took to build a Model T, from 12 hours to just 90 minutes.
Mass production allowed Ford to significantly reduce the price of the Model T, making it affordable for a wider range of consumers.
The assembly line concept spread to other industries, revolutionizing manufacturing and impacting the global economy. He got an idea and made it happen- no need of outside help.
A shopping mall is an idea- nothing more nothing less. Someone thought of a huge market place say four story with a few million square feet of floor space, centralised air conditioning, and lifts and escalators. All these technologies were already existing. Civil engineering, Air conditioning and lifts and escalators. It had to be someone other than us to think of this and look at how this Mall business proliferated- in fact now overproliferated. Gulf was the first to copy and we probably toed the line too.
Newer ideas
Podcasting idea/concept, initially known as "audio blogging," emerged in the early 2000s, with the term "podcast" coined in 2004 by Ben Hammersley, combining "iPod" and "broadcast". Just an idea. See how many podcasters have come up. There are estimated to be over 3.2 million podcasts globally today.
You need ideas not money- an idea gets you money. Money chases a good idea.
The value chain is long and tardy
You cannot paint the entire startup cum entrepreneur cum innovation chain in one stroke of the brush. This will be wrong.
You need to look on the time axis and also vertical wise.
You cannot discuss food delivery startup and space/ AI/ semiconductor domain together all at once.
I feel they need to co-exist- though mutually exclusive in their investments and ROI.
Yes, at the same time the government, investors and innovators need to move up the value chain ASAP.
American entrepreneur system and their efforts to invent was not born yesterday. They went through two major prolonged wars, depressions, recessions and unemployment for decades. They had pain as well gain though pain was not of direct consequence to gain. But pain it was.
We need to figure out our own way. Yes, one can learn from others, speed scale and adaptability are the key points. Most important is to think, think, and think. Imagine, imagine, and imagine. Observe, observe, and observe.
Appropriate or intermediate technology is way forward, workable way where deep tech and low tech and food delivery coexist.
Appropriate technology in our context can be described as the simplest level of technology that can achieve the intended purpose, whereas in other nations higher on the development curve/economic freedom, it can refer to engineering that takes adequate consideration of social and environmental consequences.
You can neither stifle national economy nor can you squeeze the startup movement. Such technology has been used to address issues in a wide range of fields like: bike- and hand-powered water pump, the bicycles, solar lamps and streetlights. It needs to take care of the economy of a nation at that point in time.
Amazon was in the red for a very long time. It started as a book store e commerce platform and gradually with patience moved along, learning and fine tuning on the go to become – anything under the sun- kind of a market place.
Jeff Bezos being the largest individual shareholder of Amazon in a way is the head delivery boy!
Technological limbo
We have made a lot of money with the BPO industry and servicing the software biggies in the west and also catering to local demands. BPO succeeded as we spoke good English and were ready to work on different painful time zones. It worked for our economy.
The disappointment is in the software sector which as it stands today stands in the middle of deep tech and appropriate tech spectrum.
Internet has been firmly in place for decades and most American Silicon Valley guys have cashed on it.
Instead of smelling the coffee we were happy sniffing the dollars that gave us a high.
We have close to 2 million- yes 20 lac - software professions as back of the envelope calculation. Mahindra Satyam, TCS, HCL and Infosys could suffice. But have we created one software product which has changed the way the world works? The answer is no. Why Twitter could not come out of IIT Delhi or IIT Bombay? Half the Silicon Valley has Indian engineers and so does NASA.
Google, face book, you tube twitter now sold to musk for 40 billion dollars as X are examples of great inventions.
Larry Page with Sergey Brin, created the online search engine Google, one of the most popular websites on the Internet.
While Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, have amassed significant wealth, they faced financial struggles initially, particularly when Google was a startup. preferring to focus on research and technology rather than solely on profits. This is what we need to learn.
Following the closing of the $25 million financing round, Sequoia encouraged Brin and Page to hire a CEO. Today the counting is from millions to trillions, where as our guys are quick to sell based on evaluation, make a quick buck. Piyush Goyal noted this too.
Can anyone guess or imagine what will be the next game changer like google, Facebook Twitter being the last few in this species? And who will come up with the ‘new Idea’? Someone once again from the West in California or an Indian Sitting in Chennai?
While listening to debates on TV most experts agree that we are doing copy paste jobs. Afterall Flipkart is a ditto copy of Amazon. And so are food apps or cab apps.
Kaun Banega Crorepati is an Indian Hindi-language television game show. It is the official Hindi adaptation of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? We copy show formats too. Though now our films are coming with great story lines.
Oh, come on- can’t we come up with something original. 33 crore brains in America verses 145 crore brains in India. Scale tilts towards us squarely.
"If you can't fly, then run. If you can't run, then walk. If you can't walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving." - Martin Luther King Jr.
Don’t shoot the messenger!
Especially when he is a very well qualified, well meaning and a change maker himself. Shri Piyush Goyal a sitting cabinet minister. He is pushing the envelope for a good reason.
Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal delivered a sharp critique of India’s startup ecosystem, highlighting its heavy focus on food delivery, betting, and fantasy sports apps, while contrasting it with China’s advancements in electric vehicles (EVs), battery technology, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence (AI).
Speaking at the Startup Maha Kumbh on Thursday, Goyal questioned whether the country was settling for low-paying gig jobs rather than striving for technological innovation. “Do we want to make ice cream or silicon chips? Are we just here for retail?" he asked, urging startups to pursue meaningful innovation.
There was lot of criticism on this remark but I feel he conveyed his point very aptly and appropriately. One must take his concern with some degree of seriousness.
I have heard his clip carefully and do not find any derogatory tinge to what he said. He is right and it his job to nudge the next generation of startups/innovators. Nothing wrong. I feel people from the so called ‘hallowed echo system’ must cull out the ideas from his talk and take it as a constructive suggestion rather than criticism. Do not forget he also along with his team has a lot of sweat equity and moolah equity at stake- he is the venture capitalist of the VCs.
Yes, in initial days you start with low hanging fruits but as we move in time you need to jump a bit higher to reach to higher branches of the tree. He is not asking to take a leap but move forward out of the comfort zone as quickly as possible. Remember India has to catch up on the lost time and we have no time to waste.
Let me say it loud and clear that in my thirty years of writing, penning down 45 books and more than four hundred articles I have always welcomed the suggestions/criticism of my editors- more than a dozen of them. I thank them for their concern as they do value addition to my work. At the end of the day, I want my book to be as flawless and readable as possible.
Observation is the key to innovation
Look for gaps and I normally look at the books in my area- read some to understand what others are saying. And then decide what I should write- can I bring a fresh idea to the table? This is the moot point.
In most rudiment observation on observation is when man observed a log rolling down a hill- eureka- he thought of a wheel! And wheel was invented for bullock carts and chariots.
Then he kept on reinventing the wheel till he came with rubber tyres, filled with air, nitrogen then tubeless tyres.
While various patents for tubeless tires existed, including one by Killen Tire in 1928 and Wingfoot Corporation (a Goodyear subsidiary) in 1944, many designs faced technical issues and saw limited production. Frank Herzegh, working for BF Goodrich, applied for a patent in 1946 and received US patent in 1952. The key advancement came with the use of butyl rubber, a synthetic rubber more resistant to air leakage than the natural rubber used in earlier designs. By the 1950s, tubeless tires, reinforced with alternating plies of cord, became standard equipment on new automobiles.
Cross breed innovation
In the West people were working on different areas simultaneously and there was may be adaptation of ideas from one vertical to the other. We must do that cross pollination.
One man shows
Let us not keep blaming the system or the echo system or the country. Lot many did a lot, created a lot, earned a lot and generated a lot of employment single handedly- working against odds. They had problems but never blamed others.
These guys ‘thought adventurously’. I don’t know how to define adventurous thinking but below examples prove this exists and maybe we lack it. Common sense thinking too.
The string trimmer was invented in the early 1970s by George Ballas of Houston, Texas, (when he was fifty year old) who conceived the idea while watching the revolving action of the cleaning brushes in an automatic car wash. His first trimmer was made by attaching pieces of heavy-duty fishing line to a tin can bolted to an edger. He called it the "Weed Eater” which was used world over for trimming grass. Net sales of his product rose from about $570,000 in 1972 to $41 million in 1976.
We need to generate ideas and that is the crux of it. Weed eater was a one man show- a bright idea based on need-based observation. So was AK -47 the dreaded automatic weapon. The initials AK represent Avtomat Kalashnikova, Russian for “automatic Kalashnikov,” for its designer, Mikhail Kalashnikov, in 1947. He was wounded in combat in October 1941 and hospitalised until April 1942. In the last few months of being in hospital, he overheard some fellow soldiers bemoaning their current rifles, which were plagued with reliability issues, such as jamming. As he continued to overhear the complaints that the Soviet soldiers had, as soon as he was discharged, he went to work on what would become the famous AK-47 assault rifle. You may like to watch movie,AK-47 a Russian biographical film about the experiences of Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle.
The first rolling suitcase was invented 50 years ago by Bernard D. Sadow, the former vice president of a Massachusetts luggage company. Sadow patented it in 1972 — and could be pulled around the airport by a strap.
Not only it led to an uptick in luggage demand for the suitcase industry but also to a total reconfiguration of overhead storage bins in order to accommodate the new design. Four-wheeled spinner luggage was next worldwide invention.
While exact annual sales figures for Post-it notes are not publicly released, 3M, the manufacturer, produces around 80 billion Post-it notes annually, and the global sticky note market is estimated to be worth around $2.4 billion.
Spencer Silver at 3M in US while developing a superstrong adhesive accidently created reusable low tack adhesive later used for POST IT NOTES. In 2010, the creators joined the National Inventors Hall of Fame as a result of the widespread success.
Automatic telephone exchange - Strowger, a small businessman, actually an undertaker- not an engineer- invented an automatic telephone exchange after he realised that the manual telephone exchange operators were deliberately interfering with his calls, leading to loss of business. Strowger swore to "get even" with the telephone operators and "put every last one of them out of a job- and he did.
Soichiro Honda founded Honda Motor Co., Ltd. on September 24, 1948, in Hamamatsu City.
Honda's first product to be sold on the market was the A-Type engine in 1947, known for its rotary disk valves and die-casting manufacturing method. In 1949, Honda introduced its first full-fledged motorcycle, the Dream D-Type, which was entirely designed and engineered by Honda, including the motorcycle body frames. Rest as they say is a history.
Before the assembly line thought out by Ford, building a car was a slow, labour-intensive process, requiring highly skilled craftsmen to complete the entire vehicle.
Ford's innovation was to move the work to the workers, rather than the workers moving to the work. He used a conveyor belt to move the chassis from one station to the next, where different workers performed specific tasks.
The assembly line dramatically reduced the time it took to build a Model T, from 12 hours to just 90 minutes.
Mass production allowed Ford to significantly reduce the price of the Model T, making it affordable for a wider range of consumers.
The assembly line concept spread to other industries, revolutionizing manufacturing and impacting the global economy. He got an idea and made it happen- no need of outside help.
A shopping mall is an idea- nothing more nothing less. Someone thought of a huge market place say four story with a few million square feet of floor space, centralised air conditioning, and lifts and escalators. All these technologies were already existing. Civil engineering, Air conditioning and lifts and escalators. It had to be someone other than us to think of this and look at how this Mall business proliferated- in fact now overproliferated. Gulf was the first to copy and we probably toed the line too.
Newer ideas
Podcasting idea/concept, initially known as "audio blogging," emerged in the early 2000s, with the term "podcast" coined in 2004 by Ben Hammersley, combining "iPod" and "broadcast". Just an idea. See how many podcasters have come up. There are estimated to be over 3.2 million podcasts globally today.
You need ideas not money- an idea gets you money. Money chases a good idea.
The value chain is long and tardy
You cannot paint the entire startup cum entrepreneur cum innovation chain in one stroke of the brush. This will be wrong.
You need to look on the time axis and also vertical wise.
You cannot discuss food delivery startup and space/ AI/ semiconductor domain together all at once.
I feel they need to co-exist- though mutually exclusive in their investments and ROI.
Yes, at the same time the government, investors and innovators need to move up the value chain ASAP.
American entrepreneur system and their efforts to invent was not born yesterday. They went through two major prolonged wars, depressions, recessions and unemployment for decades. They had pain as well gain though pain was not of direct consequence to gain. But pain it was.
We need to figure out our own way. Yes, one can learn from others, speed scale and adaptability are the key points. Most important is to think, think, and think. Imagine, imagine, and imagine. Observe, observe, and observe.
Appropriate or intermediate technology is way forward, workable way where deep tech and low tech and food delivery coexist.
Appropriate technology in our context can be described as the simplest level of technology that can achieve the intended purpose, whereas in other nations higher on the development curve/economic freedom, it can refer to engineering that takes adequate consideration of social and environmental consequences.
You can neither stifle national economy nor can you squeeze the startup movement. Such technology has been used to address issues in a wide range of fields like: bike- and hand-powered water pump, the bicycles, solar lamps and streetlights. It needs to take care of the economy of a nation at that point in time.
Today Amazon and google and space X all happily exist together and may be at two extreme ends of the innovation/startup spectrum.
Jeff Bezos being the largest individual shareholder of Amazon in a way is the head delivery boy!
Technological limbo
We have made a lot of money with the BPO industry and servicing the software biggies in the west and also catering to local demands. BPO succeeded as we spoke good English and were ready to work on different painful time zones. It worked for our economy.
The disappointment is in the software sector which as it stands today stands in the middle of deep tech and appropriate tech spectrum.
Internet has been firmly in place for decades and most American Silicon Valley guys have cashed on it.
You cannot blame anyone else except ourselves. We were happy programming for others, writing sub routines for some one calling the shots from the west. We got the biggest kick signing up a contract of two million USD with oracle or Microsoft- knowing fully well you were only a cog in the huge machine.
We have close to 2 million- yes 20 lac - software professions as back of the envelope calculation. Mahindra Satyam, TCS, HCL and Infosys could suffice. But have we created one software product which has changed the way the world works? The answer is no. Why Twitter could not come out of IIT Delhi or IIT Bombay? Half the Silicon Valley has Indian engineers and so does NASA.
Google, face book, you tube twitter now sold to musk for 40 billion dollars as X are examples of great inventions.
Google started by two PhD students is a 2 trillion dollar plus company? They never blamed the system. Nor did Apple.
While Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, have amassed significant wealth, they faced financial struggles initially, particularly when Google was a startup. preferring to focus on research and technology rather than solely on profits. This is what we need to learn.
While Google still needed more funding for their further expansion, Brin and Page were hesitant to take the company public, despite their financial issues. They were not ready to give up control over Google.
Can anyone guess or imagine what will be the next game changer like google, Facebook Twitter being the last few in this species? And who will come up with the ‘new Idea’? Someone once again from the West in California or an Indian Sitting in Chennai?
While listening to debates on TV most experts agree that we are doing copy paste jobs. Afterall Flipkart is a ditto copy of Amazon. And so are food apps or cab apps.
Kaun Banega Crorepati is an Indian Hindi-language television game show. It is the official Hindi adaptation of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? We copy show formats too. Though now our films are coming with great story lines.
Oh, come on- can’t we come up with something original. 33 crore brains in America verses 145 crore brains in India. Scale tilts towards us squarely.
"If you can't fly, then run. If you can't run, then walk. If you can't walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving." - Martin Luther King Jr.
