Taking a lead from Silicon Valley, bringing it to the Garden City.
By R. Chandrasekaran
CHENNAI: India’s IT hub, Bangalore, has been identified by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s magazine, Technology Review, as one among the top eight innovation clusters in the world.
Only in November last year, Startup Genome, a global research organization, had given Bangalore a ranking among 20 dominant startup ecosystems in the world. The city got the best rank in mindset index, meant to measure entrepreneurs’ high risk appetite, withstanding capability to overcome challenges encountered by startups and strong work ethics.
The magazine’s rating focused primarily on four factors: liberal immigration laws, entrepreneurial culture, strong IP protection and good weather. The innovation bunches are places where there is intense webs of interconnected technology companies apart from customers and suppliers.
One of the reasons for Bangalore to be identified as a top innovation cluster is its close connection with Silicon Valley and its contribution to the innovation culture. The dean of the University of California AnnaLee Saxenian has been quoted by MIT Technology review as saying, “Where global technology centers have successfully developed — as in Bangalore — it’s been because people ‘marinated’ in Silicon Valley and then returned home to start companies.”
The National Association of Software Service Companies (NASSCOM) product council chairman Ravi Gururaj felt proud of Bangalore’s innovative culture and said: “Most people tend to think of products when they think of innovation. But there is also innovation in business processes and models — that’s the kind of innovation Bangalore has done for the global software industry. Now, we have a high-potential product innovation ecosystem emerging, with a lot of folks feeding off each other, and the emergence of investors and successful entrepreneurs.”
Infosys and Wipro are two companies that predominantly operate from Bangalore and their contribution in technological advancement in the world has got world-wide recognition.
To contact the author, email to rchandrasekaran@americanbazaaronline.com