Why India shouldn’t be succeeding — but is about to experience an innovation boom

When I started researching India’s engineering education in 2005, my first conclusion was that Indian I.T. was doomed. The country was barely graduating enough engineers to staff this growing industry. The quality of engineers that India’s universities graduated was also inconsistent, and most were unemployable.

To make matters worse, India graduated hardly any engineering PhDs—so there wasn’t much hope of improving the education system. I concluded that Indian innovation would never get off the ground.

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Yet, during my trip to Mumbai this month, in a talk I gave at INK India (a spicy version of TED), I predicted that in less than a decade there will be tens of thousands of start-ups building health sensors, robots, drones, commerce, and infrastructure tools; hundreds of thousands of app builders solving local problems; and millions of Internet entrepreneurs.

I’d come to conclude that India is about to experience an entrepreneurship boom that will make America’s dot-com boom seem lame. It is entrepreneurs who will be solving not only India’s problems but those of the world.

What changed after 2005? How did innovation in India begin to bloom, and how did Indian engineers achieve such success? Watch my INK talk to learn the answer.

Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, director of research at Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke, and distinguished fellow at Singularity University. His past appointments include Harvard Law School, University of California Berkeley, and Emory University.