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

By Sebastián Vidal

A recent Financial Times article celebrates the flexible thinking of Indian businesses in the COVID-19 pandemic, as those companies have reacted in real time to the latest challenges and calibrated those reactions according to the local context. This type of agility and rapid sense-checking is a distinct characteristic of the emerging market grind.

Too often, we assume that large injections of capital are the golden ticket for entrepreneurial ecosystems, when really, talent is the main source of ecosystem success.

Large sums of capital come with a plan to disrupt existing industries, to make a location a leader in a particular vertical, and to grow as rapidly as possible. In the process, however, both investors and startups are more likely to tolerate high risks as they rush toward market domination.

Photo courtesy of Karolina Grabowska.