'US should innovate, not protect mkt'

BANGALORE: Gururaj Deshpande, appointed recently as co-chairman of US president Barack Obama's National Advisory Council on innovation and entrepreneurship, said the US would suffer if the country became protectionist, instead of innovating.
Reacting to a question on the US move to hike H1/L1 visa fees and a US senator describing Infosys Technologies as a ‘chop shop', Deshpande said the US had to focus on becoming more innovative and entrepreneurial to maintain their standard of living, given that many jobs were now moving to other countries.Deshpande, who was in Bangalore on Friday for the 10th anniversary of Tejas Networks, one of the several companies that he has helped incubate, said the role of the Advisory Council would be to intensify efforts to connect the research happening in universities with marketplace demands, and incubate companies that can take patented ideas and create businesses out of them.
He attributed Tejas' success to a similar process of doing innovations relevant to the Indian market and its ability to scale the innovations. Tejas is today one of India's biggest technology product companies, with a revenue of Rs 620 crore in the year ended March 2010. Many Indian and overseas telecom carriers are users of Tejas' networking products.
Deshpande, who is N R Narayana Murthy's brother-in-law (his wife Jayashree and Murthy's wife Sudha are sisters), said Rohan's decision to marry Lakshmi, daughter of TVS Motors chief Venu Srinivasan, was a "nice, pleasant surprise".