Why Hasn't India Produced an Innovator Like the Apple Founder?

Why Hasn't India Produced an Innovator Like the Apple Founder? - NYTimes.com

The other great bugbear of entrepreneurship in India has been what Mr. Sood calls the country’s “socialist flirtation,” which stifled the creativity of individuals and corporate houses. That flirtation ended in 1991, and Mr. Sood has sensed reasons for optimism since then. “The fact that Steve Jobs’ death made such big news in India shows that young people are seeing themselves in him,” he said. “To be that brashly innovative, and to expect that kind of world-remaking success – people expect that in this generation.”

But innovation, in this case, can be defined too narrowly, as a particularly Jobsian focus on high-end consumer technology and sleek capitalism. True innovation must involve making the most impressive use of a common resource. For Jobs, that resource has been the high density of technologists in Silicon Valley, while in India, that resource is inexpensive labor. To convert this labor into a company with the stature of Infosys is also a form of innovation, even if it seems to hew closely to what Mr. Mahindra told theEconomic Times: “We think like a sweat shop.” (In his quoted comments, Mr. Mahindra mentioned only one recent technology innovator from India: Sabeer Bhatia, the inventor of Hotmail, although Mr. Bhatia did his innovating while he was based in the United States.)