An MIT Corporation life-member, Gururaj Deshpande believes he can replicate his sandbox models throughout the US to create more entrepreneurs and jobs
Anantha Badu’s father died when he was young. He now stays with his mother and nine siblings near Puri, Orissa (India). Getting even a square meal a day can be a herculean task. Yet, Anantha wants to continue going to school and become an engineer for which he needs a good diet to keep his brains ticking.
Fortunately, his school provides him a proper meal. But Anantha’s is not a lone case. Around 1.3 million such children in about 7,700 government, government-aided schools and anganwadis (day-care centers) across eight states in India, with similar dreams, are being fed nutritious diets daily in their respective schools by the Akshaya Patra Foundation — a Bangalore-based trust.
Around 60 per cent of the funds are given by the Indian government (as part of the Centre’s mid-day meal scheme) while the rest is generated through donations from India and abroad.
A life-member of MIT Corporation, Gururaj Deshpande — who was appointed co-Chairman of US President Barack Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in June 2010 — has been helping raise money for the Akshaya Patra scheme from the US for the past several years. He recalls beginning as a supporter of the project, then an advisor and is currently Chairman of its US office.
Popularly known as ‘Desh’, he terms his work with Akshay Patra as a ‘Social Innovation Sandbox’ project — one of the 60-odd projects in India which are governed by the Deshpande Foundation, created by Desh and his wife Jaishree.
Deshpande believes the ‘Sandbox’ model will work in any part of the world. Over the last 10 years, for instance, the MIT Deshpande Foundation (another sandbox model) has funded around 80 projects in the US, and help set up 23 companies which have collectively raised around $200 million.
“The challenge is to make ideas relevant to the real world. This is precisely what we do at the MIT Deshpande Centre for Technological Innovation (towards which he contributed $20 million). It’s here that we show how innovation when combined with relevance results in ‘impact’,” he asserts.
And in December 2010, the Deshpande Foundation committed $5 million over the next five years to support a new innovation center housed at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The Merrimack Valley Sandbox, as it’s called, will work together with local colleges and non-profits to boost entrepreneurship among students and professionals, and to develop local leadership through mentoring and seed funding programmes.
“I believe the US has always been an economy which encourages innnovation and entrepreneurship. However, countries like India and China have put pressure on the US to perform better. The cost of living in the US is very high. So we need more ideas and entrepreneurs to creat new jobs and industries — both locally and globally,” says Deshpande.
He now plans to replicate these success stories as co-Chairman of the Obama council on innovation and entrepreneurship (with the help of the other 25 members) which had its first meeting in September 2010 and the second one in December 2010.
“The US spends around $150 billion on research. This is tax payers’ money. Around $40 billion goes towards university grants. The government is interested in getting more out of these tax dollars,” points out Deshpande.
The Obama innovation advisory team, which includes Desh, is working on strategies which can generate early-stage capital to take ideas to the market place (eg. angel investors). It is also exploring an ‘exit’ strategy for such investors who “can get bogged down by stringent laws such as the Sarbanes Oxley or SOX when trying to exit”. Third, the team is working on how to get universities “collaborate much better with industries.
But, haven’t universities been doing so for the last two decades? Desh does not agree. He argues that most unversities typically “peddle licenses of patents they have acquired for innovations”. “What we are saying is that if a professor has an idea, s/he can start a conversation with the marketplace. We call it ‘concurrent innovation’.”
Wouldn’t that lead to ‘intellectual corruption’? “I’ve heard that argument before,” says Desh, adding: “In places like MIT, the peer pressure is considerable enough to ensure that quality of research is not diluted. We have not come across any such examples till date.”
Meanwhile, the Obama innovation team is also focusing on “celebration”. “It’s important that countries celebrate success stories. Most jobs (around 40 per cent) in the US are being funded by new companies. Globalisation will only make this trend more competitive,” says Deshpande who understands how to make businesses grow.
Over the last 10 years, Deshpande has been spending around 50 per cent of his time with his profit ventures. “The remaining time is spent on philanthrophy.” He has five businesses — Sandstone Capital, Sycamore Networks, A123 Systems, HiveFire, Tejas Networks — of which he is Chairman. He has also invested in Airvana Inc.
“All innovation is contextual and solutions need to be provided for demands from the real world. Innovation and relevance results in impact,” is his simple mantra.
