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Indians have a negative attitude to entrepreneurship: survey

Neha Kaushik

India surely has a long way to go before it begins to be perceived as an entrepreneurial society. In fact, responses to a survey suggest that the country as a whole does not consider itself to be very entrepreneurial, with 50 per cent of the respondents saying that India has a negative attitude to entrepreneurship.

This was discovered in a survey conducted by Accenture, titled 'Liberating the Entrepreneurship', in 22 different countries, including India. An average of 40 companies were surveyed in each country.

But surely there have got to be reasons for this. Sanjay Jain, partner at Accenture, says, "Amongst other things we found that Indians perceive a cultural aversion to risk taking as one of the reasons." In fact, 78 per cent of those surveyed think this to be a key barrier to entrepreneurship.

Other reasons found in the survey include the environment of complacency found in large corporations here, and a not so rewarding compensation system. "The culture here is such that if one performs, one gets a small bonus; if not, one gets fired", says Jain. Thereby, there is little incentive to inculcate a spirit of entrepreneurship.

Many executives also cited bureaucratic hassles, the lack of resources and the lack of entrepreneurial role models in organisation (with 68 per cent of Indian executives mentioning this which is well above the global average of 53 per cent) as a perceived barrier to entrepreneurship within an organisation.

No wonder, 90 per cent of the Indian executives feel left behind and believe that the country has to become more entrepreneurial.

According to Jain, for India to become more entrepreneurial, some key steps need to be followed. These include internal fixes such as encouraging diversity in thinking in an organisation; cultural fixes, which is probably the toughest one, since it needs to start with a change in the educational system carrying on to on-the-job experience; rewarding of entrepreneurship by providing proper incentives; and changes in the external environment which includes better access to capital, a proper tax regime and so on.

Jain believes that with the implementation of these steps, India should become an entrepreneurial society in five years. "A majority of Indians have the ability to be entrepreneurial. This can be seen especially by the performance of Indians who have gone abroad and have been very successful," he say.

Meanwhile, some of the findings also brought to light a global perception towards entrepreneurship. Amongst other things, it was found that entrepreneurship is not about a single individual but about teamwork and collaboration. Further, corporates were found to believe that it is better to be leader of an entrepreneurial organisation than for a leader to be an entrepreneur himself.

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