Indian startups need to scale up, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw says

Friday August 21, 2015 , 2 min Read

A vibrant startup scene is welcome, but newly incorporated companies should aim for scaling up their innovations given the peculiar needs of a large country like India, Biocon chairperson and Managing Director Kiran Mazumdar Shaw said.

"India can not afford just to be a startup nation, we have to scale up because we are too large a nation and economy to be like what Israel is doing," Shaw said at the second SBI Economics and Banking Conclave in Mumbai. She said Israel is the undisputed startup nation, but it can live off licencing the innovations which come from the startups, but in India, the companies have to focus on exploiting them commercially.

kiran Mazumdar Shaw Bio-Technology Wizard

"I think we need to focus on how do we scale up these very successful startups. That is where the impediments are in a country like ours because we will never be able to scale up to the potential that they have," she said. Shaw said in sectors like biotechnology, the emergence of startups is resulting in a reverse brain drain, with talent returning to India to join the new companies.It can be noted that many startups have flourished over the last few years in the country, which now has the entire ecosystem, including incubation centres, co-working places and funding sources, in place. This led Prime Minister Narendra Modi to exhort the people to have more such companies in his Independence Day speech.

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