Commercial academics: an Indian story

Abstract

Venture funding today is geared to entrepreneurial initiatives that are innovative, address new markets, are highly scalable and thus growth oriented. On a time dimension, the sooner this is achieved the better. Given this scenario, successful technology entrepreneurs must possess good domain knowledge and deep-rooted technical expertise. The recent history of high-tech successes has shown us that in the above conditions, academic research based startups and entrepreneurs from academic environments have been highly successful with astounding contributions towards wealth creation. These entrepreneurship activities are knowledge based and so is the current knowledge economy. In the era of technology start-ups, for a company to grow and achieve industry leadership, the fundamental requirement is technical superiority and development leadership. This calls for a great deal of depth in the domain knowledge. Universities have to build necessary bridges for entrepreneurs to travel with their technological innovations.