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FOSS.IN: A report
FOSS.IN: A report
Posted Dec 8, 2005 19:45 UTC (Thu) by umesh (guest, #3692)Parent article: FOSS.IN: A report
I did not attend the conference myself. However, I was educated in one of the premium educational institutes in India and have worked in India for a long time. The limitations of Banglore is not just limited to participation in Free Software movement. It goes lot beyond that. Banglore is mostly a service hub with excellent technology talent. Still we have not seen innovative products come out of Banglore why?
In my opinion the issue comes down to leadership, innovation, and risk tolerance.
Let me elaborate on each one of them:
1. Leadership: In most of the world top educational Institutes promote free thinking leaders over caged computer engineers or civil engineers or mechanical engineers. Not in Indian institutes and society. The emphasis here is training software engineers and obtaining the best possible grades. The result is we have excellent engineers but no leaders. There was a very lively discussion on this topic at this blog: http://o3.indiatimes.com/alive/archive/2005/12/05/361529....
2. Banglore is great at creating software once its objective is defined. Trust me it can be very innovative in software design, architecture, implementation. However, it is pathetic when it comes to business innovation. From business point of view, every one has seen things work in cerain way and have seen how to reap profit out of it. If you are still enjoying it what is need of business innovation. Universities never taught business innovation anyway.
3. This brings me to my third point: Risk Tolerance. From this mean financial risk tolerance. Most of the guys working in Banglore come from pretty middle level background. Most of their family probably earns 1/3rd to 1/4th of what they earn. Most of them have to financially support their extended family cannot take financial risk of a new innovative enterprise.
If Banglore wants to get to the next step, it really needs to break this fixed mold and the leadership towards this goal has to come from Universities.
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