India is not known for innovation.
The Indian collective psyche still responds to the fear of poverty rather than the excitement of discovery. We chase degrees and we chase high-income jobs — a reflex perhaps set in motion by the British-era civil services examinations, the forerunner of today’s IAS, which made the exam the standard of merit. In Indian culture, passing an exam is the achievement. To discover something, or to know something deeply, is treated almost as an aberration. The goal is material attainment and the security of a family built around it. Increasingly, those who cannot crack the exam settle for the next best proof of merit: a job abroad.
There are a billion minds here, and most of them are set on the same target — a high-income job, anywhere in the world. And Indians are remarkably good at winning those jobs.
But what about innovation? Can’t Indians do original things?
The description above makes Indians people of the navy, not pirates. We are obedient. We acquire the required skill, we look to a leader for direction, and we act — but we are not eager to understand too much, or to explore for its own sake. Very few Indian business innovations are adopted across the world, and fewer still in the fundamental sciences. Innovation needs curiosity and a stubborn independence of mind, and on the surface these are the very traits we seem to lack.
At Episodic Labs, I wanted to challenge that norm.
My hiring constraints left me a single pool to draw from: fresh graduates, taken on as interns. So I had to incubate them slowly and let them make mistakes. The advantage of graduates was that they were open — open to learning, and especially to learning something career-enhancing like IoT and AI. Having worked in Germany, I also noticed a stark contrast. Indian graduates were more obedient and forever waiting for guidance; Germans were process-oriented, because everything in Germany is process.
So my first move was to cut off the guidance. I wanted to set off a loop: make a mistake, learn, iterate.
The second problem was that my team members didn’t talk to each other. Every detail was routed through me, which was exhausting. Then I remembered that my closest childhood friendships had been forged on the cricket field — a place where I dropped my guard and spoke freely. So I ran an experiment: I introduced football. It took two months, but everyone eventually joined the game, and playing became part of our culture. Within three or four months the results showed. People had become independent of me. They stopped keeping me in the loop; I would learn of things only after they were done. They sorted out issues and ideas among themselves, and I had become a minor distraction — exactly as I’d hoped.
My third move was to name a hero. I wanted a living example of what good and great looked like, so I chose Kuldeep, an engineer I had set loose on a graph-theory problem. When he genuinely went after it — and came close to a breakthrough — I told his story again and again to the whole team. That one story set the ideal and the expectation: solve big problems. Slowly, people began throwing ideas at me. They were chasing risky solutions that weren’t in any textbook.
The fourth move was to make sure positive reinforcement followed failure, not only success. The team gelled. They began working weekends and cancelling vacations; a few slept in the office when they were locked onto a deep problem.
My methodology for building an innovative team
In the end, my methodology came down to a handful of deliberate reversals of the culture I had inherited. Remove yourself as the bottleneck: withdraw guidance so that mistakes, not managers, become the teacher. Build the human bonds first — often outside the work itself — so that ideas flow sideways between peers instead of always upward through you. Make a hero of ambition: hold up one person’s attempt at a hard problem as the standard, so that the pursuit of depth, and not the passing of an exam, becomes the mark of merit. And reward the attempt itself, so that failure feels safe enough to risk. None of this was about importing a foreign temperament. It was about building the conditions — safety, peer trust, a visible ideal, and freedom from the fear of being wrong — under which curiosity and independence, which a billion minds already possess, are finally allowed to surface.