Conclusion: General Issues

Abstract

In Western industrial civilization in its formative stages, the entrepreneurs were people who made the key innovations. One thinks of such famous names as Arkwright, Boulton and Bessemer in England; Strousbarg, Thyssen and Krupp in Germany; and Gould, Harriman, Carnegie and Ford in the United States, to cite a few. Besides these clearly exceptional personalities there were men who made minor but still important innovations. Many more were imitators and followers but those imitations involved a considerable degree of initiative and vigor. In sharp contrast, although there has been, for a long time, a number of great entrepreneurial famililies in India (e.g., the Birlas and Tatas) they have had few followers. It seems a characteristic of successful business men in India that they do not stay in a single industry; they start in one and then proceed on to some entirely unrelated industry. In this way the same group may initiate and develop a number of industries, but they do not seem to inspire imitators.