NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Stanford university’s Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) counts numerous Silicon Valley entrepreneurs among its alumni, including Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla. In 2013, Stanford GSB launched its Ignite programme for entrepreneurs and innovators, with Infosys’s Bengaluru campus acting as the host facility. Its Dean Garth Saloner was in India recently to explore the possibility of finding a facility host for The Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (Stanford Seed). Saloner spoke to Forbes India about the importance of the entrepreneurial process and why Bengaluru has managed to create an enviable startup ecosystem.

Q. How would Stanford Seed work, were it to come to India?
The idea with Seed was to work on poverty alleviation. When you think of poverty alleviation, you don’t think about a business school. When we thought about it, our conclusion was that we wanted to work with existing companies that have the potential to scale. If they could scale, they would provide employment and alleviate their region’s population from poverty. We’ve done that several times in West Africa. The idea is that in the coming months we’ll bring this to South Asia.