For the last decade, globally, innovation stories have been told through startups and startup ecosystems.

We measured progress through funding rounds, startups reaching unicorn status, accelerator programmes, and venture capital deployment. We celebrated founders, scaled software companies, and watched leading economies build startup ecosystems that created a generation of builders who believed they could build globally relevant companies. We saw this in India with the rise of companies like Zomato, Ola, Flipkart, 1mg, and many more.

It attracted capital, talent, and ambition. It transformed how young people thought about entrepreneurship.

But following the recent stories about India’s ambitions and especially Andhra Pradesh’s Quantum Valley initiative, I couldn’t help but dig into something deeper that’s happening beneath the surface.

The conversation is changing. The next chapter of India’s innovation story as well as other economies may not be about startups at all. It may be about capability.

The goal is no longer simply to build startups.

The goal is to create the conditions that make breakthroughs possible and help them scale.

That means investing in the foundational capabilities that innovation depends on: research infrastructure, access to advanced technologies, talent development, industry partnerships, and academic collaboration.

For years, ecosystems have often worked backwards. We expected founders to emerge first and infrastructure to follow.

Deeptech rarely works that way.

The most successful deeptech clusters in the world were built on foundations laid decades earlier.

• Silicon Valley benefited from DARPA, research universities and semiconductor manufacturing.

• Boston grew around world-class life sciences institutions.

• Taiwan invested heavily in semiconductor infrastructure long before it became the global centre of chip manufacturing.

In deeptech, infrastructure is not the outcome. It’s the prerequisite.

The countries that lead the next wave of innovation may not be the ones creating the most startups. They may be the ones building the strongest foundations beneath them.