Management Guru Prof.
C. K. Prahalad Inaugurates TVS Chair at Great Lakes Institute, Chennai
"As a country, India must learn
to celebrate honest wealth creation and make it a social, legitimate activity,"
said Management Guru, C. K. Prahalad, on Wednesday. Prof. Prahalad, Paul
& Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy
at the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, and who recently
earned the first spot on Suntop Media's 2007 'Thinkers 50' list, was in
Chennai for the launch of the T. S. Srinivasan Chair Professorship of
Entrepreneurship at the Great Lakes Institute of Management (GL).
Prof. Prahalad said, "No amount
of subsidies, philanthropy is a substitute to entrepreneurship." Entrepreneurs
are needed in a society that has resource constraints. "They are important
because they have aspirations that lie outside the resource space. Therefore,
they innovate within constraints. Entrepreneurs don't benchmark best practices,
but create the best practices," he noted. India has seen three waves of
entrepreneurship, and currently, it is in the third biggest opportunity. After
the first flowering of opportunity that saw the advent of trading firms, the
country went into a transformation phase, when companies started manufacturing
and bringing technology through joint ventures.
TVS Capital Funds has
instituted a chair professor of entrepreneurship to drive focused research on
formulation of strategies that can help, enable and further strengthen the
ecosystem for entrepreneurship in India. TVS Capital, part of the TVS Group, has
set up the chair at the Great Lakes Institute of Management in Chennai.
Initially, Rs. 1.2 Crore has been earmarked by TVS Capital Funds, founded by
Mr. Gopal Srinivasan.
On Wednesday, launching the
initiative, he said it was his late father T. S. Srinivasan who bought over 250
acres in Padi and over 300 acres at Hosur, with a vision to create an automotive
complex. That was at a time when car production was barely 100 cars a month. He
was able to think of creating 60,000 mopeds capacity. The potential platform has
taken 15 years to reach the 1 million-vehicle capacity, Mr. Srinivasan said,
noting that fostering and unleashing entrepreneurship is vital. Therefore, the
research of entrepreneurship ecosystem is imperative to guage the economics of
entrepreneurship. The funds are primarily for research and targeted at role
model entrepreneurs.
