BENGALURU: Bengaluru is often touted as India's Silicon Valley , but there are some aspects in which the original may not be all that it's cracked up to be.The main flaw is the limited scope of invention and innovation that is hatched in the Bay Area, making it a less-than-ideal role model for other startup ecosystem wannabes."Silicon Valley is too small and too expensive to really experiment, to bother learning new skills, to spend time working on applications for the poor," said Freeman Murray, founder of Jaaga Study, president of Code for India and founder of Jaaga Study, a residential coding programme in Bengaluru. Murray had previously worked as a software engineer at Sun Microsystems before founding his own enterprise company, Kendara , which was acquired two years later.In agreement with this view is Abhishek Goyal , cofounder at startup tracking firm Tracxn!, which focuses on US, Indian, and Chinese markets. "Silicon Valley is much more tech-oriented, with more inventions for enterprise solutions. India has to be more consumer-oriented, like China, and come up with country-specific innovations with cheap labour," said Goyal, who was formerly with Accel Partners. Experts name RedBus, Justdial, and Zipdial as local successes that were designed specifically for the local customer base.Meanwhile, the Indian startup ecosystem can also be applauded for being more outward-looking than in the West, setting sights on international markets much earlier on in the game. Some recent examples include mobile advertising company InMobi, which now has 17 offices in four continents, and seven-year-old Zomato, which has made nine acquisitions in overseas markets so far.Conversely, "By the time a Silicon Valley business model looks at options for internationalization, a lot of copycats and clones have actually popped up in those markets," commented Harish Bahl, founder of Smile Group, which helps bring global companies such as Airbnb to emerging markets.Yet India's startup ecosystem is currently extremely bullish on businesses that have succeeded in the Valley, with models copied or adapted from the area receiving funding from institutional investors."A lot of entrepreneurs mimicking successful models from the Valley are solving mainstream problems of the west, which are non-problems for India," commented Kartik Hosanagar, professor at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. "Indian investors need to think differently and I have myself been looking to invest in companies that address genuine India-specific problems, using creative and scalable approaches.""Bengaluru has a big space to play in all kinds of things that Silicon Valley isn't interested in," said Murray of Jaaga Study. "We really need to bring out what we're good at--which is we're going to have talent like no one else on the planet--and define our role in the global ecosystem."