Giving Wings To India's 'Barefoot Unicorns' : A Strategic Acceleration Model for Backing High-Aspiration Entrepreneurs through Incubation and Flexible Finance

In India, entrepreneurship is often reduced to skilling combined with nano-finance. Public programs largely wash their hands after budgeting for short-term training, linking to microfinance, and creating shared infrastructure — all designed to serve large numbers of mass entrepreneurs at subsistence levels. This paper takes a 180-degree sharp reversal of that approach. It argues that by ignoring the more aspirational, growth-ready entrepreneurs — those sitting at the top of the local entrepreneurial networks — current policies are actually promoting enterprises sub-optimally, and failing to unlock the real potential of India’s unincorporated sector. The paper proposes an Acceleration Model focused on identifying and backing Barefoot Unicorns — the high-aspiration HWEs and αHWEs strategically positioned at the top of local entrepreneurial networks — through adaptive incubation, behavioral conditioning, flexible finance (revenue-based financing, micro-equity), and network-driven scale, aligned to the unpredictable, non-linear journey toward Product–Market Fit (PMF). Even a modest shift could unlock 18 crore new jobs. This paper offers a strategic blueprint for governments, catalysts, CSR, incubators, investors, lenders, and DPI ecosystem actors to move beyond outcome-poor schemes towards high-leverage, ROI-maximizing entrepreneurship models.