Glasgow, Mar 23: Business founders are reimagining ancient wisdom to create contemporary solutions Philosophical ideology may be shaping a new generation of purpose-driven entrepreneurs in India, revealing a pattern of ‘Hindu religious entrepreneurship’, according to research led by the University of Glasgow’s Adam Smith Business School. Although Hinduism is the world’s third‑largest religion, it is strikingly understudied in business and entrepreneurship research. While often associated with renunciation, Hindu philosophical concepts such as Purusharthas explicitly recognize Artha, the rightful pursuit of prosperity, as a core life goal.
Published in the Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, the qualitative study examines 15 entrepreneurs working at the intersection of faith, technology, and heritage. The findings reveal founders who are using entrepreneurship as a way to preserve, reinterpret, and contemporize ancient wisdom. This includes a spectrum of ventures from AI models trained on Vedic texts. to virtual‑reality recreations of lost or inaccessible temples, pointing to a vibrant wave of innovation rooted in spiritual worldviews.
Professor Sreevas Sahasranamam, who led the research, said: “By aligning Karma (action) with Dharma (duty) and Artha (prosperity), these entrepreneurs are offering a very different interpretation of what success looks like today.
“Our work introduces the concept of Hindu Religious Entrepreneurial Intention, which often arises when conventional Western frameworks are inadequate, yet Hindu philosophical texts offer coherence.
“This opens new possibilities for how we think about purpose-driven entrepreneurship, foregrounding indigenous knowledge systems and widening the frame beyond Western perspectives.”
As one of the first systematic academic explorations of Hindu religious entrepreneurship from a global university, this study signals growing international recognition that non‑Western philosophical traditions meaningfully influence how founders interpret purpose, prosperity, and innovation. The research uncovers four central insights that illuminate how Hindu worldviews are informing entrepreneurial practice.
Entrepreneurship as Dharma: For these founders, entrepreneurship is a form of duty – a moral and civilizational responsibility – to safeguard, reinterpret, and serve their cultural and spiritual heritage, rather than a purely economic pursuit.
Entrepreneurs act as ‘Translators’ of tradition: These entrepreneurs bring religious narratives out of “temporal silos”, the notion that Vedic wisdom belongs solely to the past.
Instead, they make this knowledge accessible and applicable to contemporary life, identity, and technological landscapes.
Reintegrating Identity: A recurring theme in the interviews was the desire to overcome the “compartmentalized mind” – a mindset that separates the sacred from the professional.
These ventures become pathways for both founders and consumers to reconnect these domains, integrating spiritual heritage with the contemporary world.
A Purpose‑Driven Alternative to Mainstream Startup Culture: Unlike traditional startup environments, many of these founders deprioritise profit maximisation and emphasise community‑centred, values‑led growth. Drawing inspiration from the Vedas and Upanishads, texts in which knowledge is not treated as private property, these founders adopt a non‑proprietary approach to knowledge and value creation.
These findings, developed in collaboration with Dr. Anupama Kondayya of IIM Calcutta, position this study as one of the first global academic examinations of Hindu religious entrepreneurship, opening the door to a richer, more pluralistic understanding of how diverse philosophical traditions shape modern business.