siliconindia | | February 201819BUILDING DISRUPTIVE BUSINESSES: THE ART OF AUDACITYBy Vivek Saxena, Co-Founder & CEO, Digicita Venture StudioDigicita recognizes the advantageous position India has with access to rich skills and talent in both ideation and development combined with a captive diversity of consumers. It envisions this opportunity to tap India's potential to offer unique disruptive innovations to the world, after piloting those in India.Show Me the Unicorn"We don't have an environment where somebody says, 'you have a great idea and so you need to be supported.' We have instead an attitude of 'we don't need to have this, we can do well with what we have", Ratan Tata recently rued when speaking of the woeful lack of really disruptive startups in India as overseas. This set the Indian start-up world abuzz. Opinions bandied around ranged from successes of our very own unicorns, viewed more from the filter of large valuations and funding rather than their originality and impact ­ to other points of view that nodded in agreement with RNT that most Indian start-ups were really just geo-clones of successful global companies. Irrespective of which camp you may agree with, RNT's observation raises the very important question of: Are the Indian unicorns truly disruptive? True DisruptionSo, what definitively makes a start-up stand out as truly dis-ruptive? In my view, it should pass muster through these filters:1. True originality of the idea or business model ­ not just incremental2. Global scalability and appeal3. Impact in terms of how it affects the way humankind lives! In short, disruption really occurs when we chase original, audacious ideas and goals. Think Uber. Am-azon. Airbnb. The three have redefined transportation, commerce and the sharing economy. However, when we speak of the Indian `unicorns', they seem to fail when these filters are applied. Flipkart, Ola and Pay-tm have achieved phenomenal scale and impacted the way we buy, travel or pay. But, they were certainly not the first nor original in their business model. Their achievement is primarily market viability in the Indian context. That is not to downplay the CEO INSIGHTSVivek Saxena
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