Innovation and entrepreneurship rank highly on the strategic agenda of most countries today. As global economic competition intensifies, many national policymakers now recognize the central importance of entrepreneurship education and the building of financial institutions to promote long-term innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Drivers of Innovation brings together scholars from the United States and Asia to explore those education and finance policies that might be conducive to accelerating innovation and developing a more entrepreneurial workforce in East Asia. 

Some of the questions covered include: How do universities in China and Singapore experiment with new types of learning in their quest to promote innovation and entrepreneurship? Is there a need to transform the traditional university into an “entrepreneurial university”? What are the recent developments in and outstanding challenges to financing innovation in China and Japan? What is the government’s role in promoting innovative entrepreneurship under the shadow of big business in South Korea? What can we learn about the capacity of services to drive innovation-led growth in India? 

Drivers of Innovation will serve as a valuable reference for scholars and policymakers working to develop human capital for innovation in Asia.

Contents

1. Educating Entrepreneurs and Financing Innovation in Asia 
   Fei Yan, Yong Suk Lee, Lin William Cong, Charles Eesley, and Charles Lee
2. Fostering Entrepreneurship and Innovation: Education, Human Capital, and the Institutional Environment 
   Charles Eesley, Lijie Zhou, and You (Willow) Wu
3. Entrepreneurial Scaling Strategy: Managerial and Policy Considerations 
   David H. Hsu
4. Innovation Policy and Star Scientists in Japan 
   Tatsuo Sasaki, Hiromi S. Nagane, Yuta Fukudome, and Kanetaka Maki
5. Financing Innovation in Japan: Challenges and Recent Progress 
   Takeo Hoshi and Kenji Kushida
6. Promoting Entrepreneurship under the Shadow of Big Business in Korea: The Role of the Government 
   Hicheon Kim, Dohyeon Kim, and He Soung Ahn
7. The Creativity and Labor Market Performance of Korean College Graduates: Implications for Human Capital Policy 
   Jin-Yeong Kim
8. Financing Innovative Enterprises in China: A Public Policy Perspective 
   Lin William Cong, Charles M. C. Lee, Yuanyu Qu, and Tao She
9. Forging Entrepreneurship in Asia: A Comparative Study of Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore 
   Zhou Zhong, Fei Yan, and Chao Zhang
10. Education and Human Capital for Innovation in India’s Service Sector 
    Rafiq Dossani
11. In Need of a Big Bang: Toward a Merit-Based System for Government-Sponsored Research in India 
    Dinsha Mistree
12. The Implications of AI for Business and Education, and Singapore’s Policy Response 
    Mohan Kankanhalli and Bernard Yeung

Arzan Tarapore analyzes key factors in the India–Pakistan military dynamic to explore how internal and external factors account to balance the military dynamic between the volatile conflict and prevent any major escalations in disputes. Tarapore argues that geography, economic fragility, strategic implications, and a variety of other qualitative factors serve to deter the two nations from any major conflict escalation.

This chapter is part of the volume Routledge Handbook on South Asian Foreign Policy, edited by Aparna Pande.

U.S. strategy, directed toward an escalating competition with China, now sees the Indian Ocean as inseparable from the Pacific—combined in an organic Indo-Pacific whole—and India as a linchpin partner in it. As the United States plans to redouble its military power in the western Pacific, it is relying on India to grow more powerful and help safeguard their shared interests in the Indian Ocean, easing demands on U.S. resources in that region.

But that will not be the end of the story. India remains the most consequential strategic actor in the Indian Ocean by virtue of its geographic centrality, economic and military power, and abiding networks of influence across the region. But its capabilities and intentions—and therefore the strategic trajectory of the Indian Ocean—will continue to evolve as they have since the uncertain days of 1989 and long before. What if in the coming years India fails to expand its military power as its champions expect and instead is outmatched by China in the Indian Ocean? Or what if, in the throes of competition with China, India exercises its power more nakedly than its regional partners would wish? Relatedly, what if the United States, which has for decades underwritten regional security, chooses to retrench its strategic presence to focus efforts in the western Pacific? Policymakers in Washington, Canberra, and regional capitals would be well-advised to accept that many trajectories—some sharply divergent—are possible.

This essay offers a preliminary attempt at illustrating some of those sharply divergent scenarios. It uses a novel alternative futures methodology known as major/minor trends to derive scenarios of Indian and U.S. strategic behavior and their resulting effects on the Indian Ocean region. The essay briefly introduces the methodology and then sketches three alternative futures designed around a relatively weaker India, an aggressive India, and a retrenching United States, respectively. Each scenario is designed to convey a key lesson for policymakers on the fragility of the assumptions that underpin current policy. 

Using administrative data on over 4 million hospital visits, we document striking gender disparities within a government health insurance program that entitles 46 million poor individuals to free hospital care in Rajasthan, India. Females account for only 33% of hospital visits among children and 43% among the elderly. These shares are lower for more expensive types of care, and far lower than sex differences in illness prevalence can explain. Almost two-thirds of non-childbirth spending is on males. We combine these data with patient survey, census, and electoral data to show that 1) the program is unable to fully offset the costs of care-seeking, which results in disparities in hospital utilization because some households are willing to allocate more resources to male than female health; 2) lowering costs does not reduce disparities, because males benefit as much as females do; and 3) long-term exposure to village-level female leaders reduces the gender gap in utilization, but effects are modest and limited to girls and young women. In the presence of gender bias, increasing access to and subsidizing social services may increase levels of female utilization but fail to address gender inequalities without actions that specifically target females.