Can Large Companies Learn to Think Like Entrepreneurs This Samvat?

Budgets Can’t Predict Every Surprise. Companies Can Prepare to Adapt

As leaders plan for the year ahead, the challenge is to fund not only established businesses but also the experiments that could uncover new growth.

When careful plans meet an unpredictable year

For many Indian companies, the new Samvat arrives as leadership teams begin preparing budgets for the financial year starting in April. The planning process typically relies on forecasts, targets and decisions about where to deploy resources. Yet the past six years, as the source commentary observes, have repeatedly shown how events can disrupt assumptions soon after plans are approved.

Covid, the Russia-Ukraine war, tariff disruptions and conflict in West Asia are cited as examples of shocks that made companies reconsider their budgets. The challenge extends beyond identifying a disruption: its effects on consumers and markets can also be difficult to anticipate. The commentary points to recent first-half corporate results in India, where demand in several categories held up despite price increases—an outcome that was not widely anticipated by experts.

That uncertainty makes better forecasting only part of the answer. Companies also need the capacity to adjust, test responses and recognise opportunities as conditions change. For investors, the distinction matters: a budget may show what management expects, while the organisation’s ability to learn and adapt may shape how it responds when those expectations are challenged.

Jugaad needs room to experiment—and clear guardrails

The argument is not for large companies to replace formal processes with improvisation. The Indian idea of jugaad has sometimes meant finding inexpensive, imaginative solutions to customer problems; it has also drawn criticism when shortcuts compromise reliability, safety or sustainability. For companies answerable to customers, shareholders and regulators, those risks cannot be brushed aside.

The opportunity is to retain the curiosity behind entrepreneurial problem-solving while setting boundaries around how ideas are tested. The commentary recommends connecting employees across functions with customers, giving small cross-functional teams modest budgets and room to experiment, and judging early ideas by evidence of customer interest rather than presentation quality alone.

That approach also challenges the assumption that every idea should immediately pass through the same layers of review. Formal innovation funnels can screen out unconventional proposals before they reach customers. Relying instead on a senior leader’s intuition may create another problem: innovation can become a set of individual projects rather than a repeatable organisational capability.

Separate discovery from scaling

A promising idea still needs a distinct pilot stage, with access to customers, appropriate expertise and safeguards. Leaders should look for evidence of customer value, and be prepared to redesign, pivot or stop a test. The commentary argues that senior executives should become personally involved at this point, seeing how customers respond and what it takes to make an idea work.

Scaling, however, is a different task from discovery. An idea that works in a pilot may need different people, systems and routines to grow; in some cases, it may need enough independence to avoid being constrained by the organisation that developed it. Budgeting should reflect these differences: experiments need protected, limited funding, while successful pilots may need faster access to greater resources. Established businesses, meanwhile, still require performance commitments.

The source commentary also flags AI as a force that could make experimentation faster and cheaper, while creating risks that require management. That makes the leadership task more pressing: technology may help teams test ideas, but companies still need to decide what to test, how to assess evidence and when to expand an initiative.

Key Highlights

• Unexpected global disruptions have repeatedly unsettled company budget assumptions.
• Recent first-half results suggest demand in several Indian categories remained resilient despite price increases.
• Entrepreneurial experimentation can be encouraged without abandoning safety, reliability or accountability.
• Customer evidence should help determine which ideas advance beyond initial trials.
• Discovery, piloting and scaling call for different resources, processes and expectations.

Investor Note: The argument is a management perspective, not a forecast of company performance. Investors assessing businesses can consider whether leaders appear able to balance disciplined execution with a credible process for testing and scaling new ideas, while recognising that experimentation carries the possibility of failure as well as growth.