LAS VEGAS: Even as startups have mushroomed in India over the last few months, the country is yet to reach the scale of intellectual property (IP) generation being seen in nations like China and Israel, technology giant Cisco CEO John Chambers said.
"The Indian market has to do a lot more (with) startups, create that entrepreneurial spirit at a faster scale. I am committed to India, but it has not taken off in terms of IP generated anywhere like China or Israel," Chambers told PTI in an interview.
He said Indian universities can play a bigger role in fostering entrepreneurship and the spirit for innovation.
Over the last two years, a large number of technology- driven startups have come into existence. These have received funding from a range of investors including angel investors, individuals as well as large venture capitalists.
Technology firms have not only acquired a lot of such start-ups but have also set up corpus to fund innovation.
Earlier this year, Cisco also created a corpus of $100 million to invest in early-stage startups in the Internet of Everything (IoE) space globally.
In the past, Cisco invested in Indian ventures such as Apalya, Qyuki, Indiagames and Comviva.
Chambers said while there was a lot of activity going on for start-ups in India, this has to be done on a larger scale.
"If you look at the investment community, venture capitalists, many of them flooded into India thinking this will be the next wave of start-ups... We have to get that entrepreneurial spirit, at a larger scale in India," he said.
Chambers said the company partners educational institutes like the MIT and Stanford to help in this direction.
"Universities like Stanford create, foster entrepreneurial spirit. We also partner with institutes like MIT, Stanford to generate that. If you know what the issues are, you can get them fixed. A lot more engagement with academics is required," he added.
Chambers said Cisco is working with institutes in India as well to help foster innovation.
Cisco has over 10,000 employees in India across cities like Bangalore, Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune and Hyderabad. Of these, 8,000 people are part of the R&D set up.
Though the company gets about 2% of its over $48 billion global revenues from India, it is confident of growing the share.
It expects to garner 5% of its revenues from the Indian market in the next five per cent with business growing over 20%.
"India is a very important market. We remain committed and we will continue to invest in India," he said.