Startups are often associated with breaking new ground and innovation. That’s the reason for their existence and success. But is innovation the preserve of upstarts? Or can large companies innovate? That was the big question up for debate at a roundtable organised by ET and Nasscom on the sidelines of the Nasscom India Leadership Forum 2017. In a discussion with ET’s, Nasscom President Wipro Chief Strategy Officer Genpact CEO, Nutanix coounder, and Nasscom Product Chairweighed in on the topic.Innovation certainly doesn’t only belong to startups. I think startups tend be highlighted more for that only because they are breaking ground sometimes, they are challenging the status quo. In today’s world, if anybody is not innovating they atrophy in some sense.Startup is a state of mind. There is a Bain & Co partner in Mumbai called Dunigan O’Keeffe. He talks about founder’s mentality and something called the ‘paradox of growth.’ He says that growth is what you aspire for but growth creates complexities of all kinds — business complexity, organisational complexity, product complexity. And complexity kills growth. So all the things that you aspire to achieve challenge of money, they might have the challenge of supporting talent, but they don’t have a challenge in terms of pursuing an idea.If I am a startup and my job is to destroy businesses that other people have, that is so much easier. If I am a startup inside a company, the day I innovate and want to grow that innovation it will automatically start destroying the business I already have. And that’s bloody tough. I am going to say something that I think is anathema in the industry. It probably requires different leaders every five years.I would give the same statement a slight spin in the sense that you need a new leader every 5 years but you don’t need a new person. The leader has to be able to reinvent himself.The technology industry is not for the faint-hearted. Because there is so much change happening so quickly, we believe you have got to create grounds for experimentation inside. We tried two or three different things. We have, what we call, a horizon-to-horizon thing, which is really internal entrepreneurship where we encourage people to focus on an idea that may pay off four to six quarters out. We invest very selectively for six months and we kill ideas very quickly if they are not going anywhere. We do hackathons and ideathons. We do a lot of external ecosystem and that’s a big change in the company mindset.If you want to create more entrepreneurs within your orgainisation, you will have to give them equity. Employees are thinking, ‘How do I become an owner where I’m working…’ As a large company, how do you work around that?We have found that there are a lot of people in the company who want the security of being a part of a large organisation but the independence of being alone. We had two very good people a couple of years ago, who wanted to leave. We said don’t leave and they didn’t want to leave. But they wanted to do something on their own and the construct didn’t allow them to do that. We created that and then suddenly I got 55 emails from other people who wanted to do (something similar). We couldn’t afford to do that inside the company. So we still have to find the right model. How do I create value and ownership? But there are a lot of people who would say give me space to do what I want and I like the infrastructure that comes and the security, because maybe they are not as risk-taking as you would have thought.We did a couple of acquisitions last year -- small companies, they were all below $5 million a quarter or something. There is no science or formula behind it. It is eventually about creating a sense of purpose… for the initial creators, entrepreneurs, and have them feel that there is a place where I can set a context of a larger company. If you look at the most successful acquisitions in the world they were tiny companies. Android , for example, was a tiny company. Microsoft acquired Spyglass, which was a tiny company. Most of those were little things that went on to become large because the CEOs in the larger companies went on to say that we will iterate with a sense of purpose.I think the challenge in our kind of business is that if we acquire the cool startup, you are really acquiring them not for the customers but you are not acquiring them to tell them to do what you are doing and make it five times bigger. But you are actually acquiring them saying it’s so cool that I am actually going to take you and embed you into my clients and into my services. To do that I am actually going to suck you in, and if I suck you in then it’s a problem because then it becomes a culture clash.A lot of companies face that because when you acquire in the technology space, sometimes you are acquiring just for the features. In my previous company, we did a lot of acquisitions and we would look at a company and we would buy it, take the features. And two years later, everybody would say the founders are gone. They would say, oh that’s a disaster of an acquisition. But what they didn’t understand is that that the feature has actually outlived the company.In a product environment that is easy. But in the services environment, it is much different.We would never buy a startup we are investing in because we will destroy them. And we are very honest to acknowledge that we don’t have the dynamism and the entrepreneurialism… As a large organisation, we are more process-oriented.No. I mean the reason why we survive, and a lot of entrepreneurs survive, is that we are constantly dissatisfied with ourselves, the system. We sit around with the executive staff and all we say is we are dissatisfied and paranoid. That’s what actually drives a lot of behaviour in the company.Glass half-empty is always a good way to look at life.There is so much change that it just feels impossible for the human brain to process all at the same time. The brain wasn’t designed for that level of complexity. So mechanisms have to exist within startups and organisations that de-risk from that and have a structure that will enable stuff to float up. It cannot sit in one person’s head, or two or three people’s heads.Humans are actually struggling, and I myself am actually struggling, to figure out how do you weave in mindfulness and breathing meditation into a meeting that’s lasts 3-4 hours. So those things about the basic tenets of humankind, humanity, life and all that stuff are equally important when you are thinking about bringing sanity to entrepreneurship.I was in a panel earlier in the day with Rajiv Bajaj who spoke about homeopathy for simplicity and driving his organization. It’s worth listening to. Homeopathy and yoga, he is a big believer in that. His principles for running his company have come from homeopathy and yoga.My answer to that is: Yes (things are complex and changing), therefore, come up with the best answer for today and go launch… knowing fully well that the chances are by tonight you could realise 20 things that you have got wrong. But the good news is that the technology of today allows you to fix it by tomorrow morning. I remember visiting Google 5-6 years ago. At that time, Nikesh (Arora) was there and he was taking me around. We walked into this floor and we saw 300 people and he said, ‘This is my Google Maps floor.’ He said they were all developers on Google Maps. He asked: What do you think they are doing? I said they were improving functionality on Google Maps. He asked: What do you think their goal is? He said their goal was to deliver 365 versions of Google Maps. He said every night at 9.00 pm Pacific time, a version gets released… (incorporating) whatever changes had been done that day. He said every day they get millions of feedback on improvements. All that enters a queue, to the extent that they get incorporated and every day (a version) gets released. That’s the world we are in. I think we just have to constantly learn.