Innovation at Geographic scale

Innovation at Geographic scale – Lessons from India

Having lived in and worked across prominent tech innovation centers - Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, and others, it’s easy to see few of the elements that consistently shape innovation at geographic scale – robust infrastructure of technology, access to venture capital, strong and growing skills and talent, and an all-pervasive innovation mindset.

Joining that list of world-class innovation geographies is now India. Traditionally thought of as the back-office to many technology companies, India used to be where non-critical elements were efficiently run at scale. Consequently,while Quality, Data Engineering and Support teams sat in India - innovation, product design, core engineering and general management sat closer to the market and outside of India.

Not so anymore. Products that are designed for and sold to the world are now being built in India. For anyone that lives or has traveled to India recently, the pace of innovation is palpable across media, telecom, commerce, the gig economy, and so much more. Tech startups in India now attract lots of Western capital and storied Sand Hill Road VCs have all setup local shops wooing entrepreneurs in India.?But when an 80-year old who has never owned or accessed a personal computer in her life now uses her phone to pay 10 cents for a cup of tea and transact effortlessly with a street vendor who had to drop out of school at grade seven, you can see that technology in India has arrived. At scale.

In fact, India today leads in many aspects of digital public infrastructure – the value of instant digital transactions in India, for instance, is larger than that of the US, UK, France and Germany combined – at orders of magnitude. With over 1.3 billion IDs issued, 99 percent of adults in India now have a biometric identification number – a digital identity that allows them to access technology innovation conveniently – opening up a host of opportunities for innovation – from public governance to financial inclusion to medical access.

But how did we get here??Some catalysts are easy to see – the burgeoning middle class, a world-class education system, the demographics of young and working citizens, the permeability of technology and the internet, the absence of legacy technical debt that allowed for a “clean-start” in accelerating transformation, and a culture of “jugaad” (a Hindi word that doesn’t quite have an equivalent in English - but implies a combination of innovation, creativity, hunger and pride).

One critical component of the success formula though has been a unique public-private partnership that has catalyzed, systematically built out and democratized access to a core technology infrastructure loosely called the “India stack” – a set of foundational building blocks that are designed for interoperability, with minimalist footprints.?Interoperability - supported through open standards – allows anyone to utilize the functionality provided by India Stack – reducing transaction costs, fostering competition and as a result innovation - and enables growth and scalability with an open architecture which can adapt to changing needs easily.

The interplay between the government and the private sector ?has been key to all this - the government acted as an anchor client accelerating the “network effect” – driving more consumers on the platform that in turn brought more providers to the platform, creating the now-famous “flywheel cycle”.?It has also ensured ?the operation and maintenance of the infrastructure in a manner that is completely shielded from the political cycle – important for trust and adoption of the platform.

This India stack, combined with a young and vibrant talent pool, and a culture of innovation and entrepreneurism is opening an entirely new trajectory for the country and a unique place in the world within the digital economies.?And despite the unparalleled journey to this point, it’s clear that this is really just the start of what lies ahead – as generative AI and other emerging capabilities layer on top of this infrastructure, they will deliver benefits that can leverage instant scale out of the box. I spoke recently with Debjani Ghosh , and you can sense the sheer energy, the palpable excitement, and the calm confidence across the country, so wonderfully captured in the discussion here.