The Death of Indian Innovation: Why Indian Start Ups are failing to Innovate?

India has always been a development center and not a country that innovates much. People dropping out of schools or colleges also just end up in development field and not real engineering.

Even Flipkart was/is a copy cat. Although I don't have an MBA/MS, I have utmost respect for them, since it imparts at least some knowledge around the topic, further leading to thinking differently or innovating something.

The scope for innovation will stay high only if teams try their level best to stay bootstrapped, while having a small team that prefers working from office/any place where team is together.

But our mindset is also another problem. Even if there's some innovation, and unless it's useful for a business, common people won't want to pay for it. YouTube is a good example. People excessively use it, but cry saying that it's showing ads - and at the same time they are not willing to take premium subscription. How can they sustain a big service if they're not generating revenue?

Hence, by default, India becomes just a market to improve numbers.

I believe that it would take more products like Zomato, Zepto, etc which would bring a mindset shift before innovative would make sense in India again.

PS: this just my rant/take. I'm sorry if it's not aligning with how you think about it.

Adding personal Points(out of context):

2. Indian developers have no Cult Culture: I feel we lack the cult Culture of Innovation. A group of students/developers pursuing non existent technology, newer personal original concept/system architecture, scratch from basic first principle of anything.....so one. I don't find the cult of building a new programming language, new Operating System, Android System, Android OS, emotional Intelligence development,..... The cult for these doesn't exist in our ecosystem.

3. Mostly the network between different categories developers is not well established: We live in a sparsely distributed society and lack a centred connecting platform to connect similar minds.

4. Indians are way too practical, real then they should be. No Visionary:
   Ignoring the poor as a major factor, we as developers are so crippled about practical use-case, economic use-case, blah blah we don't care to chase impossible and build that. If a 12th grade child approaches you and says, " hey buddy let's build Web technologies. I have one in mind. It is an open decentralized protocol for phone/contact details sharing globally without revealing phone numbers."
   THINK ABOUT What would be your response?

We don't do anything that is not useful to society, we need to be either startup or benefit personally.

And 1) Indian developers are less collaborative, dedicated to open/properitary projects: If you think you are collaborative, contact me at secondary email nanurohita123@gmail.com

BTW I'M in Web 4.0 Cult community with 18 projects ongoing (IDK of those, I don't have access). Did any of you ever thought to join or build something like that?

If I am not mistaken, mostly of the funding rounds come with a clear expectation of growth metrics. Well unfortunately it is growth metrics, not profit metrics so it is easier to achieve the growth spending money than product development.

I think what you notice is a cultural issue. Building at scale is a completely different skill set. Unfortunately every startup employee is made to believe that large companies do not innovate. So the people that build a product from zero to one are task tasked to scale up which they fail miserably. Take for instance Facebook gave React and Cassandra, and Google Hadoop, how many startup CTOs, think of building such products for their problems which takes time and skill.

No need to get dejected. A decade and half ago, IT jobs was reserved for only class toppers from tier 1 college only. We have come a long way. The future should be equally bright minus minor blips along the way.

Innovation in india can only be done in areas where people are willing to pay for it and sadly the depth of indian market is less, day to day life affecting products/services will be the only ones paid for.

Discretionary products never have a consistent income stream in india.

Rather than just startups, I am taking a more macro view of this. Here are my thoughts.

Very innovative countries have a few prerequisites. First, they have undergone industrialization. Second, per capita income >= middle income status. We can't be 2500 USD per capita country and expect ourselves to produce Googles, Metas and OpenAI's of the world. I am going to also add a third here, innovation in the tech domain also requires some amount of government protectionism to insulate from the monopolist thrust of tech based business models.

Sadly, we have failed to consistently industrialise ourselves, but surprisingly, not for actually trying them. Since 1947, the socialist secular parties, with INC at the pinnacle of them all, realised doing manufacturing is super tough, so they went with the easy 'services' path.

Only since 2014, has the Modi led government sought to focus on manufacturing and after initial setbacks (manufacturing is hard) sort of salvaged the situation to an extent by borrowing from a nationalist cum East Asian model of industrial policy making (which has also received a bit of a very welcome helpful hand through the decoupling with China process). A long road lies ahead and much needs to be achieved, but finally it seems like we are taking the right step or two. But this doesn't guarantee anything at all. All of the positive scenario is assuming the communal bigoted INC and their regional counterparts don't come back to power.

Great innovation is downstream of these processes fructifying.

Second outcome is a problem why? They innovated to some extent, created value, and got acquired. That's a rare dream come true for most entrepreneurs and a win win for everyone.

Sustainable growth takes time. The areas that most startups work are not technologies that can be protected. Once an idea is established and it will be copied people with bigger money bags . The one with the bigger money bag will always win. So te founders try to scale up ASAP so that they have brand recognition and first mover advt. And eventually fail. Most of these start up are "trading" companies. They neither have control supply nor the demand. Most of the startup names thatbwe heard after covid will fail. They wont see the next decade.

From what it seems, looks like you are overthinking.
A startup is to come up with an innovative product, find PMF, scale it; and work on new products of its. The innovation is still in the blood. You may need to look better into the other verticals the startup runs.

In any social setting, you see more of what you promote. USA has that innovation culture because they heavily promoted the cult of self made man, that a person can be rich in one generation by doing some business in USA. They incentivize risk, treating it as a good thing. They created the systems to build sort of safety nets around these risks. Systems enabled that risk apetite or risk enabled systems is debatable, for now both exist and augment individuals for risk taking.

In india, you need to have a frugal innovation. The story needs to be that xyz person did this great thing in so little amount of money. The definition of accepted innovation is narrow. We discredit the ones where people spent a lot of money to create something great. VCs put in money when the startup is derisked even at pre seed stage. Look at how many openai wrappers were funded in india v usa.

Then the other element is structural. Inherent lack of trust and envy is counter productive in the long run.

There are still very few examples to learn how to build a company in India. Also, by examples I don't mean high valuation.