Era of empowerment

Entrepreneurs have existed from time immemorial through recorded history – adopting and adapting to market opportunities. The advent of digitisation and super connectivity, which heralded the outsourcing and resource-pooling movement, has made the world more 360 than flat.

The largest cohort since the Baby Boomers is often referred to as the Millennials – born during 1977-96. An estimated 440 million represent about 34 per cent of India’s total population, constitute nearly 46 per cent of its millennial workforce, making them the primary wage earners and dominant consumer demographic. The last of the Boomers and most of the Gen-Jones, Gen Y are incredibly sophisticated, technology-savvy, and immune to tech baits. Gen Y is much more racially and ethnically diverse, and they are more segmented as an audience, influenced by the rapid expansion in Cable TV channels, satellite radio, the Internet, e-zines, and devices that enable rapid dissemination of information. Gen Y kids, often raised in dual-income or single-parent families, were also exposed to the invasion of credit cards (now replaced by the G-Pay and Ru-Pay dynamics).

Generation Z (Zoomers: born between 1997 and 2012) is the first cohort to use the internet at a young age. With the web revolution, they have been exposed to an unprecedented amount of technology in their upbringing, with over 40 per cent spending on average three hours or more online each day.  In 2015, an estimated 150,000 apps (10 per cent of those in Apple’s App Store) were educational and aimed at children up to college level. The benefits of technology were also offset by its evils, with additions to usage addiction and distractions to focused study. This generation has struggled to balance a tech-driven and tech-free lifestyle. Even as this cohort deals with social anxiety and isolation issues, they grew up with access to online markets, drop-ship deliveries, 3D printing, and the amazing power of affordable mobile devices and their phenomenal computational powers. This generation takes advantage of global travel opportunities, the Uber and Airbnb revolution of connectivity, shared experiences, and price-point-based decisions for quality experiences. This is also the generation of Google, big data, and satellite-guided GPS navigation devices in cars.

What came next was a generation born the year iPads were introduced, and Instagram was created in 2010, and screens were used as pacifiers for babies. Mark McCrindle suggested coining the term Gen Alpha for the next generation of screenagers, noting that scientific disciplines often move to the Greek alphabet after exhausting the Roman alphabet X, Y, Z. Projected as the most formally educated generation ever, the most technology-driven and globally the wealthiest generation ever, they are born entrepreneurs.

Turning ideas into enterprise comes relatively easily to young India, riding the AI surf. With no shame or shyness to setbacks, they have shown incredible resilience in recovering from failures and scaling new heights with unprecedented speed and sophistication. India is the world's third-largest start-up ecosystem, with over 159,000 DPIIT-recognised start-ups as of January 2025, adding thousands annually. While formal startup numbers are high, India's entrepreneurial landscape includes millions of micro, small-scale, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), with over 70 million registered units driving widespread economic participation. Women run 45 per cent of start-ups in India, with over 73,000 recognised start-ups having at least one woman as director, as of late 2024. The entrepreneurial surge is supported by the Start-up India initiative, which has aided in creating over 1.66 million direct jobs between 2016 and late 2024.

While the internet is full of armchair advice and advocacy on what makes a good entrepreneur – from having a clear vision, persistent passion, resilience to overcome roadblocks, and the ability to take risks – what often takes a backseat is the business idea itself and the cerebral equity to lead from a position of innovative abundance. The idea, whether to innovate, shift paradigms, or absorb ecosystems with an intent to improve and thereby profiteer, is the magic wand that needs to be waved to waive impediments.

Unlike an artist who visualises an evolving blank canvas, the entrepreneur’s canvas already has several layers of generational work in place. The options of erasing it all are sometimes slim and unnecessary. Rearranging the existing strokes and realigning the base to invite new lines of new lineage can yield a new perspective that can permeate across disciplines and time. At the soul of this endeavour is creating true value that Elon Musk quirkily compares to eating glass and staring into an abyss of delta vectors, where progress is its sigma.

The author is a world-renowned Indo-Canadian museum futurist, author, educationist, Commonwealth Fellow and founding president of award-winning institutions