Meet Laxman and Hetal Hemnani. A couple who met and worked together in the Pune Computer Training Center of APTECH in the nineties and then moved to Beijing where Laxman first worked in and then ran the company’s very successful Joint Venture with Beijing University. In the middle of the last decade, the couple saw an entrepreneurial opportunity in bringing Indian cuisine to Beijing and set up their first Ganges restaurant with the highest quality of service and food. Today the Ganges chain has five successful outlets and has a clientele which includes large numbers of Chinese regulars and Western expatriates. IT’s loss has been the gain of the Food and Hospitality sector.

Laxman and Hetal are not alone in choosing a path less traveled for entrepreneurial success. At a corner of the domestic airport in Mumbai two bright red chairs have sprung up with a board proclaiming ShineEdge that promises shoe shining while you wait for your flight. The company is now setting up similar shine points at various public locations and even in IT campuses. A home shine service is also being offered which might well see the entrepreneur emerging as the leader in a new opportunity space. No prizes for guessing that the entrepreneur was till recently a IT project manager at one of India’s Top Five companies and when the entrepreneurial bug bit him it was not the intellectual Jobs or the articulate Gates who inspired him but a much more basic need.

Ask any young MBA student to name successful entrepreneurs in the IT industry and the names that come to mind will still be Narayana Murthy, Azim Premji and Shiv Nadar. A few might remember Rajesh Hukku and team who grew and sold iFlex to Oracle but hardly any company started in the last twenty years would come to mind as a role model for the new generation to emulate. Some have started , received NASSCOM awards and showed promise but very few have been able to make the multiple transitions needed to scale from 1 crore to 10 crore, then 10 crore to 100 crore and then aspire and reach the 1000 crore mark. What ails Indian IT entrepreneurship? Why are we unable to even scent the emergence of a new Google or Facebook or Apple or Microsoft from this vast country with so much talent?

Many reasons get trotted out for this – the global market for services is already mature, the domestic market has too many roadblocks for a young entrepreneur to succeed on pure merit and our country just does not have the venture capital willingness to put the big bucks into marketing needed to successfully scale a product business! While there may be some merit in these arguments, the white spaces available – in mobility, social media, information security and even skills development, should give ample opportunity for companies to start and flourish. Will the imminent slowdown encourage some folk to throw their hats into the entrepreneurial ring? I hope so!

Dr Ganesh Natarajan is Vice Chairman & MD of Zensar Technologies Ltd and a member of NASSCOM’s Chairmen’s Council.