Category: Centres of excellence

Prof. G.Sabarinathan1 examines the swelling tide of capital, the growing allocation to alternative investments, institutional evolution and demand-supply dynamics that have impacted the role of the VC industry in the governance of investee firms It has been an eventful week for venture capital (VC). In USA, which I will focus on for now, Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos was convicted.2 Interestingly, Holmes’ conviction coincided with the end of a year when the US VC industry hit a funding record of $ 330 billion in 2021! Coincidentally, perhaps, the Indian VC…

The recent rapid emergence of unicorns in India leads Professor G. Sabarinathan1, 2to explore this phenomenon and ponder whether the obsession has gone too far Last week, CBInsights, now an almost universal go-to shop for data on startups and tech businesses, published a list of unicorns across the world. At 702, the number of unicorns surprised me although it need not have, going by the almost daily flow of news of the minting of the newest unicorn somewhere in the world. That size of 700 was significant enough for anyone…

In a frenzy of an extended weekend reading, I finished two recently published memoirs of women, now well into their 80s – Devaki Jain’s ‘The Brass Notebook: A memoir’ and Shanta Gokhale’s ‘One Foot on the Ground: A Life told through the Body’.* Both women are exemplars of modern Indian women representing a unique cohort – generations that witnessed the unfolding of India’s post-independence years. The similarity in their life histories is rather incongruous but explained by their unique times and the fact that only a privileged few in those…

Deepti Ganapathy, faculty in the Management Communication area, IIMB, writes that the signals are strong and one needs to mine the communication networks to pick up the conducive atmosphere for creating jobs The recent budget has given much emphasis on innovation and R&D, and doubled the total financial aid to students to INR 2482.32 crores. India entered the top 50 innovating countries for the first time in 2020, since inception of the Global Innovation Index, by improving its rank from 81 in 2015 to 48 in 2020. Among lower middle-income…