While youths are our strength, our MSMEs are the engines of Job creations, and the key to make them both attain global benchmarks is via Innovation, the Minister said.
Coimbatore: “We have to figure out a way to convert what is our single natural strength which is the talent pool; the scale of young people that we have, and how do we convert them to highly productive globally competitive productivity people,” said Tamil Nadu’s IT Minister Palanivel Thiagarajan (PTR) while addressing a gathering of MSME entrepreneurs and academics in Coimbatore on Wednesday.
He was addressing at the AdvantEdge Innovation Conclave organized by business solutions provider MindEscapes at The Residency Towers.
While youths are our strength, our MSMEs are the engines of Job creations, and the key to make them both attain global benchmarks is via Innovation, the Minister said.
He said that no other State in India has the structure of the ecosystem that we have in Tamil Nadu. He said that if one measures Tamil Nadu by the number of MSME organizations, the small manufacturing units, the people in our workforce, the percentage of women in our workforce,etc., by all measures we stand a league apart from most of the country.
However, MSMEs have to think globally, and decide on what kind of products and services they are going to offer in this global economy.
PTR said that it would be an incredible challenge for MSMEs to compete with somebody who can make things much faster or at a much larger scale. But through innovation and by leveraging technology they can scale in a way that they could not do so before, and increase their competitiveness in the global market, and can also succeed.
China was once the sole choice of numerous nations for their manufacturing needs but now the tides have turned for China, he said.
PTR said that China became a manufacturing powerhouse, and by being so strong in that sector it was able to build huge foreign reserves, and became a global power. Now, fortune is favoring India.
No other country in the world today has the scale, the demographics and the potential that India has, and it is going to be a golden era for India, at least for the next 20 years, and our nation has to capitalize this, the Minister said.
Various speakers at the AdvantEdge Innovation Conclave spoke about the ways for MSMEs to go global, how they can build a world class business using local resources, how they can accelerate via Industry 4.0, and how they can revolutionize manufacturing with the Internet of Things (IoT).
Dipali Sikand, Chief Innovation Officer at MindEscapes, Vishnu Venugopalan, MD, Guidance Tamil Nadu, Atanu Das, Technical Director, KPMG, Prashanth Subramanian,Co-Founder, Quadra Systems and many others addressed the gathering.