Chennai: Perhaps for the first time in the Indian corporate annals a research grant to an educational institution has been made in the memory of a business leader.

The Chennai-based TVS Capital Funds Ltd has instituted a 'chair professorship of entrepreneurship' at the Great Lakes Institute of Management for Entrepreneurship in the memory of the late T S Srinivasan.

Srinivasan is said to have been the moving force behind the phenomenal growth of the Rs16,000 crore TVS Group's move into auto component and moped manufacturing.

TVS Capital Funds has donated Rs.1.2 crore towards the chair to undertake research on entrepreneurship in its entirety.

Launching the chair, noted management authority C K Prahalad divided the Indian entrepreneurship phase into three phases.

According to him, during the first phase (1947-1990), Indian entrepreneurship was swamped under the licence control regime.

"The second phase started in 1990 when the country opened its doors for multi national companies and the third is when Indian companies started acquiring foreign companies bigger than themselves," he said.

According to him it is a misnomer to term the early 1990s as the opening up of Indian industry to globalisation, saying, "We opened our doors to imports and not exports."

However, during that phase industry saw the emergence of domestic information technology and pharmaceutical producers using India's cost advantage and oriented totally towards exports while others fought the increased competition at home.

On the third wave he said, "The days are not far when nearly 60 per cent of some Indian company's turnover would be contributed by its overseas operations."
According to Prahalad the next phase is would be to use globalisation to transform Indian entrepreneurship.

"In 60s business leaders like T S Srinivasan fought bottlenecks and regulations and not the markets. During the last 15 years businessmen fought competitive deficiencies within India - lack of quality perspective, infrastructure and others," he remarked.

Now the fight is for global dominance - fighting on scale and quality. According to him India has an edge of China as it is developing the soft infrastructure knowledge-base and skill sets.

Gopal Srinivasan, chairman, TVS Capital said, the chair will ensure entrepreneurship as a concept and model is fully understood at the management level."
The activities conducted by the chair would be two fold: academic research and industry oriented dissemination of the learning by way of teaching, training and management consulting.

Addressing the gathering from US through videoconference Professor Bala V Balachandran, founder and honorary dean, Great Lakes Institute of Management said, entrepreneurship is at the heart of economic growth of any nation and India should create nurture entrepreneurs in large numbers.