Management Guru Prof. C. K. Prahalad Inaugurates TVS Chair at Great Lakes Institute, Chennai

Management Guru Prof. C. K. Prahalad Inaugurates TVS Chair at Great Lakes Institute, Chennai

"As a country, India must learn to celebrate honest wealth creation and make it a social, legitimate activity," said Management Guru, C. K. Prahalad, on Wednesday. Prof. Prahalad, Paul & Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy

at the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, and who recently earned the first spot on Suntop Media's 2007 'Thinkers 50' list, was in Chennai for the launch of the T. S. Srinivasan Chair Professorship of Entrepreneurship at the Great Lakes Institute of Management (GL).

Prof. Prahalad said, "No amount of subsidies, philanthropy is a substitute to entrepreneurship." Entrepreneurs are needed in a society that has resource constraints. "They are important because they have aspirations that lie outside the resource space. Therefore, they innovate within constraints. Entrepreneurs don't benchmark best practices, but create the best practices," he noted. India has seen three waves of entrepreneurship, and currently, it is in the third biggest opportunity. After the first flowering of opportunity that saw the advent of trading firms, the country went into a transformation phase, when companies started manufacturing and bringing technology through joint ventures.

TVS Capital Funds has instituted a chair professor of entrepreneurship to drive focused research on formulation of strategies that can help, enable and further strengthen the ecosystem for entrepreneurship in India. TVS Capital, part of the TVS Group, has set up the chair at the Great Lakes Institute of Management in Chennai. Initially, Rs. 1.2 Crore has been earmarked by TVS Capital Funds, founded by Mr. Gopal Srinivasan.

On Wednesday, launching the initiative, he said it was his late father T. S. Srinivasan who bought over 250 acres in Padi and over 300 acres at Hosur, with a vision to create an automotive complex. That was at a time when car production was barely 100 cars a month. He was able to think of creating 60,000 mopeds capacity. The potential platform has taken 15 years to reach the 1 million-vehicle capacity, Mr. Srinivasan said, noting that fostering and unleashing entrepreneurship is vital. Therefore, the research of entrepreneurship ecosystem is imperative to guage the economics of entrepreneurship. The funds are primarily for research and targeted at role model entrepreneurs.

Concluded.

Contributed by -
Ashutosh Chaudhary,
PGPM Batch 2007-08,
Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai.

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