Re-emerging Asian countries promise to regain their high level of contributions to world production and trade, and India has the resources to innovate sustainably. The leadership provided by relatively less populous countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong has been motivating many countries, including larger ones such as China, India and Iran. Japan may not have the youth of 1964 (hosting the first Olympics in Asia), but has growing maturity of institutions, along with technological and innovation capabilities, to be a role model as it revitalizes for 2020. It will become the first Asian country to host the Olympics twice. From its spectacular successes in engineering (e.g. defence to space; Kalam and Rajan 2002), India is moving ahead on innovations that benefit the masses (e.g. ICT access) or profit businesses internationally (e.g. IT services). Some firms of Indian origin (FIOs) have been trying painstakingly to compete internationally, not only in software services, but also in technology-based emerging industries such as biopharmaceuticals, where cooperative strategies with institutes can be highly fruitful. Higher stages in the competitiveness journey of firms (Momaya 2001) or institutions can demand much higher flexibility (e.g. Sushil 2007) and health for systematic innovation (Krishnan 2010). The capitalist model of economic development that India has embraced depends on the industrial firm as the driver of progress. As cost advantages erode rapidly in the face of intensifying competition (reaching levels of hyper-competition in several markets in India, e.g. automotive, electronics, FMCG, telecom), focal FIOs (FFIOs) will have to discover other sources of competitive advantages or character competence (e.g. Sharma 2016). Flexibility, innovation and vitality can be some of those sources of advantages. Flexibility has been emerging as an important concept that can link functional silos (such as operations, marketing and finance) to provide agility to organizations to cope up with change. The paradigm of ‘strategic flexibility’ came to the forefront of industrial practice, which synthesized the strengths of most of the previous theories of strategic management in a novel way to fill gaps (Sushil 2015, 2016). Strategic flexibility also acts as a predictor of vitality and sustainability of the enterprise (Sushil 2011). Innovation on multiple fronts— from process and product to business model and technological—is becoming important as India aspires to accelerate on competitiveness enhancement and growth. While firms are the key drivers of growth and adapt from many alternate strategies for growth (Ghosh 2010), focal institutes can also play an important role to shape the ecosystem of competitive industries.