Financing ventures in India: needs, ground reality and challenges

Emerging competitive era post‐liberalization offers lot of opportunities and challenges for firms, organizations and their stakeholders in India. Ventures can be a vehicle for achieving innovation and competitiveness and are growing rapidly. Access to quality financing is a key success factor of such ventures and remains an area of weakness in India. Findings and learning of an attempt to look into problems and issues of financing ventures are presented in this paper. Primary data collected from fieldwork across key cities in India is complemented by analysis of secondary data collected from India and abroad. Balancing the Western and Eastern views, implications are drawn for key stakeholders. There is urgent need for scale‐up on funding for seed stage, systems for effective cooperation among key stakeholders, and overall environment and infrastructure, if innovative products/services from India are to make a mark on global level and ventures are to meet aspirations about competitiveness.