Indian start-ups to have head start due to India’s G20 presidency: Chintan Vaishnav

He said that the G20 countries willing to continue the Start-up 20 working group beyond India’s presidency was an “important decision” as it will allow start-ups to “have a collective voice in terms of putting out a communique for world leaders”.

“We recognise that start-ups and MSMEs are natural engines of growth. They are key to socio-economic transformation by driving innovation and creating employment. We welcome the establishment of the Start-up 20 Engagement Group during India’s G20 Presidency and its continuation,” G20 countries had said in the New Delhi Leaders’ declaration last week.

“It is an important decision because until now, conversations about start-ups and SMEs were happening under the larger umbrella of the B20 working group. But the group has large corporations who have a different set of priorities,” Vaishnav said.

“Now, with Start-up 20 becoming part of the G20 framework, which was pioneered by India, the smaller businesses and upcoming start-ups will have a collective voice in terms of putting out a communique for world leaders,” he added.

He also said that policy intervention is necessary to ensure that start-ups can access international markets without having to relocate there. “If that does not happen, they might be forced to relocate to other nations,” Vaishnav said.

The Start-up 20 working group, in its joint communique, had broadly recommended raising the global annual investment in start-ups to $1 trillion by 2020, which would be about three times the current annual average; create channels, including bilateral and multilateral fora, for start-ups to access markets, funds and talent; identifying and embracing practices that make start-ups more inclusive; developing mechanisms to identify start-ups that could be of global interests; and creating a global network that is made of national stakeholders that work on start-ups.

“The Start-up 20 group would be considered successful if it enables G20 nations to scout for promising start-ups, allows joint investment, offers contextual mentorship to businesses and helps them scale globally,” Vaishnav said.

One of the major facets of the Start-up 20 communique was its attempt at creating a framework that could be used for defining start-ups globally. The report identified five parameters to constitute the definitional framework for a start-up – legal entity, age, size, scalability and innovation.

The communique, released earlier this year, also envisages a global networked institution comprising a Global Network of Centres (GNC) that will connect startup ecosystems across G20 nations to weave together the global ecosystem for supporting startups.

It suggested a three-tiered architecture, where for every nation or region the existing regional nodes (RNs) connect to a regional network centre (RNC) that acts as their nodal access point or point of contact. The RNCs are in turn woven into the GNCs.

The GNC may be led by the G20 Troika and the country that has the G20 Presidency may serve as its secretariat during their tenure, the communique said. Currently, the GNC is imagined to be a virtual body with the RNCs as its members.