We are heading towards a creative economy and India is unprepared for that: Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia

Sabeer Bhatia, 53, co-founder and CEO of ShowReel and co-founder of Hotmail.

Tech industry veteran and co-founder of Hotmail Sabeer Bhatia said that India is unprepared for the next wave of creative economy through startups and needs to upgrade its education system to create the next set of jobs. Bhatia’s comments come at a time when upskilling in emerging technologies is increasingly becoming a part of public discourse for job creation in India.

Bhatia added that 90 percent of business ideas coming out of India are copycat ideas.

Speaking at the NASSCOM Technology and Leadership Summit 2023, Bhatia, co-founder of Showreel said, “We are heading towards a creative economy and India is unprepared for that. The education system doesn’t encourage out-of-the-box thinking. I have a solution to create 50-60 million jobs by investing in a million innovative ideas.”

“Let the youth imagine the future. Fund their ideas, about 90% of the ideas might fail, but the 10% successful will create $20-40 trillion for banks. All the jobs were created by innovative ideas that didn’t exist before. 90% of India’s energy is now into copycat ideas. In Silicon Valley, none of the ideas that created $30-40 trillion value of wealth were not run of the mill ideas,” he added.

Bhatia believes that Indians focusing on ‘make in India’ is an outdated story, and was more relevant in the 1980s when China latched on to it.

“Even if we are successful in attracting the world’s manufacturing in India, we will only have around 100,000 more new jobs at the end of the year,” Bhatia said.

Bhatia was in discussion with Ashish Dhawan of The Convergence Foundation (TCF) and Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder of Fractal AI.

Dhawan disagreed with Bhatia’s idea of the startup sector itself being able to solve all issues and added that there needs to be a right policy push and investments into R&D from the government.

Dhawan said, “To move up the value chain in the next 10-15 years, R&D needs to go up from 0.7% of GDP to 2.5% GDP in the next 10 years. It’s not easy to do science, it is bureaucratic. We have to prioritise going more to universities instead of small R&D labs. This will connect the academia and R&D labs to the ministry.”

“Incentives and policies need to be created,” he added.

According to Dhawan, India needs to break into lower and middle-income categories through coherent industry policies.

In terms of segments to focus on, he said, “India has done well in chemistry, but pharma is stuck with generics. If we don’t invest in life science, bioscience and deep tech, we will not be able to find a seat in the table for future job generation.”