The Quiet Revolution Inside Textile Msmes: Mattering More Than Subsidy And Schemes

Multiple examples in the textile industry show how “intrapreneurship" can quietly transform a traditional business into a faster, more profitable, and opportunity-seeking organisation,

When Gurukant Desai, a.k.a. Guru in the movie of the same name, faces a challenge wherein K R Menon closes the textile trading office, he resolves the issue by dumping his textile stock at the IAS officer's house. Guru’s original thinking in resolving the problem is a hallmark of his approach, as shown in the movie.

Not everyone in business has the knack of resolving issues like Guru, but all of them can tap into the minds of their employees to innovate and achieve similar results. In other words, they don’t need a Silicon Valley mindset to innovate, but need to trust the people already sitting in their offices. Multiple examples in the textile industry show how “intrapreneurship" can quietly transform a traditional business into a faster, more profitable, and opportunity-seeking organisation.

Small ideas, significant impact

In March 2025, the founder of this textile firm was grappling with the headache of fluctuating prices. One employee devised a simple solution using an Excel-based costing tool that instantly calculated the real cost of an order by factoring in volatile yarn prices and labour rates, thereby eliminating repeated manual calculations and costly pricing errors. This initiative reduced decision time from minutes to seconds and prevented losses that had earlier accumulated to around Rs 3 million due to mispricing. This solution was not a moonshot; it was a simple fix to an everyday pain point.

In another case, an employee redesigned the payment process using the government’s e-way bill system to create proof of timely dispatch and trigger earlier payment requests. This process reduced the payment cycle from approximately a week to roughly a day for key clients, freeing up working capital and allowing the firm to accept 15–20% more orders – translating into an additional Rs 4.5–60 million of business. This payment process was a small idea but had a big impact on cash flow.

In textile trading, leftover raw material sits like silent debt on the trader’s books when manufacturers hold it for months and use it interest-free. When this hold occurs repeatedly, it ties up cash and forces the supplier to keep infusing new capital. In one instance, a young commerce graduate proposed a simple rule: no payment to manufacturers until all leftover raw material was received back.

This one policy tweak compressed the return period of residual inventory from three to four months to about a week, sharply improving cash flow and lifting profit percentages by over 50% in 2022–23 and more than 23% in 2023–24. For a firm with revenues of Rs 300 million in 2023–24, such gains became the difference between surviving and compounding.

Tackling the bottlenecks inside MSMEs

These stories are not about one clever Excel sheet or one e-way bill. They chronicle what happens when a traditional MSME treats employees as internal entrepreneurs rather than order-takers. These firms have employees who are typically recent graduates, mostly from local colleges, and are unlikely to come from elite MBA programs. Yet when given autonomy, information, and support, they systematically redesigned systems and processes of costing, collections, inventory, and time management.

These are examples of intrapreneurship in its most grounded form: employees within an existing company identifying inefficiencies, testing solutions, and sharing in the responsibility for growth. For India's textile hubs – from Bhiwandi and Ichalkaranji to Surat – such internal innovations may matter more than any single scheme or subsidy, because they tackle the real bottlenecks of productivity, cash flow, and responsiveness to customers. For many firms, improving internal efficiency and cost control are also becoming the strongest shield against any external shocks.

Lessons for MSMEs

For MSMEs in the textile sector, the lesson is clear. Most MSMEs grapple with similar headaches: delayed payments, stuck inventory, and staff whose time is consumed by routine tasks. Instead of blaming "the market" or hiring expensive consultants, the owners need to turn to their employees and ask them to solve these problems. They need to create an informal innovation ecosystem by openly sharing business challenges, encouraging employees to suggest unconventional solutions, and giving them autonomy to test ideas.

More specifically, owners of trading and manufacturing firms must deliberately create space for employee-led innovation by sharing real business challenges with their teams, rather than just issuing instructions. Second, they should start small: a quarterly challenge round, a modest internal "innovation kitty" to fund experiments, and visible recognition for ideas that save time, reduce risk, or improve margins.

Finally, banks, industry associations, textile ministry, and other policymakers need to recognise and support intrapreneurship in MSMEs as seriously as they support startups. Tax incentives, targeted credit lines, and advisory support that reward documented internal innovations – even process tweaks – could unlock thousands of similar stories across the state. When India talks about becoming a global textile powerhouse, it is these quiet internal entrepreneurs within our trading offices, not only flashy founders in metros, who will ultimately weave that future.

In an era of trade uncertainty and punitive tariffs, intrapreneurship is no longer a management fad; it can be an industrial survival strategy. It does not require fancy titles or big innovation budgets – trust, information sharing and a willingness to experiment.

Authors: Prof. Amarpreet Singh Ghura, Faculty of Entrepreneurship, FLAME University; and Prof. Abhishek, Professor, IMT Ghaziabad.