Ravi Venkatesan On The Missing Entrepreneurial Drive In India's MSMEs | Ep 4 | Growth Is Good

From classrooms to political rallies to multilateral summits, entrepreneurship is the buzzword being peppered liberally everywhere, and for good reason. It’s the fulcrum of innovation, employment and wealth creation. And nothing breeds success like success! It takes a few to succeed, for a thousand more to strive for success. So, the flywheel keeps spinning. But are we correctly defining entrepreneurship – the kind that will be one of the solutions to India’s unemployment puzzle? It’s not narrow, i.e. restricted to tech startups with an office in Bengaluru looking to be the next unicorn. It’s also not entrepreneurship by compulsion, like the street vendor with a degree who’d much rather have a good job. We want entrepreneurship by conviction; to have that, we must remove the compliance burden that prevents our micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) from becoming bigger. FED’s analysis reveals that of the 6.5 crore MSMEs in India, only 60,000 engage in meaningful exports. Much of it is because of a deficient ecosystem – only 15% of Indian MSMEs can access formal credit. Our guest for this episode argues that a lot of it is also attributable to the absence of a growth mindset and complacency. In this episode of FED Dialogues, Piyush Doshi, Operating Partner at Foundation for Economic Development, sat down with Ravi Venkatesan, who quit a successful corporate career at Microsoft and founded Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME). From working with local businesses in Ludhiana to help them identify a growth event to pursue, to seeding the idea of entrepreneurship in young minds through the school curriculum, Ravi shares profound insights about what it takes to encourage an entrepreneurial drive in an entire nation. What keeps him going? “It’s a country with mouth-watering opportunities and eye-watering challenges.” Watch the full episode.