Sachin Tendulkar, the Indian cricketer known as the Little Master for his abilities, has reportedly said: "The mind always wants to be in the past or the future. It never wants to be in the present. My best batting is when my mind is in the present. It does not happen naturally, you have to take yourself there."
For Tendulkar, as with his home city of Mumbai, the present is one of great promise built on past success.
While another Indian city, Bangalore, is regarded as having more high-technology business, Mumbaikars – residents of Mumbai – offer the country glitz and glamour with the Bollywood film industry and other serviceled companies, as well as big industrial groups and one of the Indian Institutes of Technology.
Recent successes from business process outsourcers, such as WNS, in which private equity firm Warburg Pincus was understood to have made a large return from its majority stake sale two years ago, have fuelled confidence among entrepreneurs.
One venture capital investor said: "Indian business valuations are very high and the market is well intermediated, and there are a lot of private equity firms with dry powder [money] to invest. But given prices, firms are prepared to fund new businesses with $50m to $100m to build platform plays.
"Mumbai is a media-centric city with tremendous creativity as well as industrial groups, such as Reliance and Tata [which have corporate venturing units]."
He added the interest in entrepreneurs using the internet to shake up businesses was unlike anything he had seen since 1999’s dot.com bubble in the US.
Allied to this ambition and the resources to invest is a focus on capital efficiency.
Just before his death last year, management professor CK Prahalad, in an article for Harvard Business Review, said: "Affordability and sustainability, not premium pricing and abundance, should drive innovation today … Learning to do more with less for more people, we believe, should be the innovator’s dream … Nowhere is this more evident than in India, which was not exactly famous for innovation until recently."
It has been two decades since India opened from under heavy centralist controls – and 16 years since the city was renamed from Bombay – and the Prahalad article, Innovation’s Holy Grail, co-written with RA Mashelkar, identifies three kinds of innovation coming from India: disrupting business models, modifying organisational capabilities and creating or sourcing new capabilities. Traditional innovation programmes, by contrast, concentrate on the four Ps – product, process, packaging and pricing.
Although Mumbai suffers along with the rest of India with widescale reports of corruption and remains in the bottom third of countries for ease of doing business according to the World Bank, entrepreneurs are working on new ideas. These are seen even in its sprawling 174 hectare Dharavi slum, which recycles $1.3bn of garbage each year.
The metropolis of more than 20 million people is also investing in its infrastructure to boost sustainabilityfocused research and development.
In the past year, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority and the University of Pune have said they are building an innovation park for 25,000 scientists, including a business incubator.
Given the recent history of relative economic freedom, most entrepreneurs have been so-called first generation innovators, unshackled from caste and tradition, according to an analysis by news provider Financial Times.
The FT said the entrepreneurs now had a middle-class background, their parents were wage earners; they went to India’s top universities, some also had an MBA or PhD from the US, and they worked for a big company for a few years before going on to set up their own venture".