ET Under 40 2026: How technology is creating younger leaders

Technology is creating leadership opportunities for Indians at an increasingly younger age, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, founder and executive chairperson of Biocon and jury chair for this year's The Economic Times 40 Under Forty awards, said on Friday.

Mazumdar-Shaw said the changing nature of business and technology could eventually make age-based recognitions such as 40 Under Forty obsolete in their current form. "I won't be surprised that the award ceremonies of the future will not just be 40 Under Forty, but it will be 30 Under Thirty and 20 Under Twenty because that's what this leadership opportunity is about today," she said.

Speaking at the awards ceremony, Mazumdar-Shaw said the jury had found it difficult to select the winners from a large pool of young leaders representing a diverse range of industries and institutions.


She said the 40 awardees reflected a generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders "taking bold bets" and building "out-of-the-box models" while scaling credible businesses. "When I built my company almost five decades ago, I would not have been able to build many of these enterprises that we judged as a jury," Mazumdar-Shaw said.

She said the leadership represented by the winners would help shape India's future economic profile, particularly as technology assumes a larger role across industries. "It is this leadership that is going to build the future economic profile of our country," she said, adding that future business leaders would be led by technology, drive technology and help India pursue its aspirations for 2047.

Mazumdar-Shaw said the country's young leaders would be central to India's ambition to become a global leader in the fields it chooses to pursue.