The panelists included:
Mr. Deep Kalra, Founder & CEO, MakeMyTrip – Chair
Mr. Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Managing Director, One97 Communications
Prof Anil Gupta, President, SRISTI
Mr. Rajeev Karwal, Founder, Director, Milagrow Business & Knowledge Solutions – TiE host



Deep Kalra started off asking about what was common between a pocket calculator, an Apple iPod, Nylon and JetBlue airlines? While the audience came up with a wide variety of answers. He said that they all came up during recession times. When somebody asked Kalra what is the audience comprised of? He replied that they were all successful entrepreneurs or going to be successful entrepreneurs.

Praising Prof. Gupta -

Kalra then handed it over to Prof. Anil Gupta after quoting that he was a student of Prof. Anil at IIM Ahmedabad and is a great fan of his work, listing out all the awards he won including the Padma Shri National Award in 2004 and was adjudged as one of the Star Personalities of Asia among the fifty leaders at the forefront of change by Business Week in 2001. Prof Anil was listed as one of the fifty most influential people in the field of intellectual property rights around the world in 2003 and many more.

Adding a little humor, Deep asked Prof. Gupta of where does he keep all these awards?

Innovations in India -

Prof. Anil Gupta took over the session showing a laptop with two display screens. He asked the audience if they knew who invented it. Later said that it was a heart surgeon, Dr Janardhan Reddy who always had problems sharing the health report of his patients on his laptop.

Anil pointed out a distinct clause in the agreement with the distributor that said, “The american distributor will not reverse engineer the product.” According to him all these days it was the Indian distributor who had to sign similiar agreements for American inventions but now times are changing.

Blackbox for a Car –



Prof. Anil then asked if anybody ever saw a Blackbox in a car. He also asked, “Where could the innovation been done? The audience shouted out “IIT’s, IISC, NIT’s ,DCE, to our surprise he said the innovation has been done by four girls in the Government Polytechnic, Latur under the guidance of Smt. C.V. Omergekar.

Innovation at grass root level

Prof Guta said that there’s tremendous amount of innovation at grass root level in India and there’s a missing link between innovator, entrepreneur and investor. He listed out other inventions -

* Compressed air car: invented by Kanak Gogoi, which runs at 6 paisa/km.
* One of the best drugs for the treatment of Typhoid developed by a team from Jharkhand. Virus which is getting resistant to all the drugs available in the market.
* Fruit ripener: A herbal fruit ripener invention done in Orissa, which not only ripens the fruit better but makes the fruit sweeter and healthier.

innovation


Check out the SRISTI innovation database here.

Evolution of One97 -

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder and MD, One97 then took off the discussion describing how One97 evolved. He said that at the outset the cost of voice platforms was very exhorbitant. They tried selling 911 call tracking solution to mobile operators. In return the mobile operators offered a price point ZERO for that.

He said that he started out in 2001 during the downturn and faced various challenges raising funds. He used to attend tiecon hunting for VC’s as every other entreprenuer at TiEcon.



Answering to a question from the audience, Vijay said that it is not true that India has got an entrepreneurship friendly atmosphere. In the beginning it was difficult to hire an employee with good experience in his company, everyone aspires to get into an MNC and people are averse to join startups. He pointed out that in the early days even his father wanted him to quit his thing and get a decent job in an MNC.

Adding humor to the discussion Prof.Anil said MNC stands for ‘M Not Creative’ and that people now-a-days wear the branded shirts with label stitched outside and it means that one is no good per se.

Google offered to buy One97 -



When Prof.Anil insisted Vijay to spell out One97’s number’s he said now his company has 750 employee’s and in the previous month there were 250 million downloads and 2.5 billion paid transactions on One97’s platform.

Vijay later pointed out during the discussion that Google offered to buy One97 and he refused the offer.