Learning about Social
Entrepreneurship:
Reflections from organizing
National Conferences on Social Entrepreneurship
Madhukar Shukla, XLRI Jamshedpur
(Paper presented at the conference on "Rural India: Blossoming in neglect"by Vikasanvesh Foundation/ Tata Trusts, Pune, August 28-30, 2019)
Introduction
In January
2009, XLRI organized the 1st National Conference on Social
Entrepreneurship (NCSE) in its campus in Jamshedpur. The purpose of this two
day conference was to bring together some of the prominent social entrepreneurs
and developmental professionals on a common platform to showcase their work and
share their experiences and solutions to address critical social problems. The theme of the first conference was “Providing
Access for Sustainable Development” and correspondingly we invited social
sector professionals (from NGOs, social ventures, government agencies,
corporate CSR/ foundations, etc.) which were using innovative solutions for
providing access to education, to healthcare, to credit and financial services,
to market, etc., to the under-served population.
The response
to the conference was quite positive. It was attended by about 150 sector
professionals, academics and students, and about twenty social entrepreneurs participated
as speakers over two days. Some of the well-recognized names among speakers
included Anshu Gupta (Founder, Goonj), Chetna Gala Sinha (Founder, Mann Deshi
Mahila Sahakari Bank), Joe Madiath (Founder and ED, Gram Vikas), Rajeev
Khandelwal (Director, Aajeevika Bureau), Samit Ghosh (Ujjivan Bank), Sushmita
Ghosh (President Emeritus, Ashoka), and Vijay Mahajan (Founder, BASIX), etc.
Encouraged
by the response and feedback, both from the participants and speakers, XLRI
continued to organize the conference in the coming nine years.
Each conference was designed around an over-arching theme, and individual conference
sessions explored specific facets of that theme through the work of
practitioners/ speakers (see Table 1). Over the years, the conference hosted about
1200-1300 participants, and more than 200 social entrepreneurs and sector
professionals as speakers.
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Table 1: Themes of the National Conference
on Social Entrepreneurship
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Year
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Theme of the Conference
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2009
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1st
NCSE: Providing Access for
Sustainable Development
|
|
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2010
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2nd
NCSE: Solutions for Inclusive
Development (Working Conference)
|
|
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2011
|
3rd
NCSE: Youth, Development and Social
Entrepreneurship
|
|
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2012
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4th
NCSE: Entrepreneurship for Rural
Revival
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|
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2013
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5th
NCSE: Innovations in Livelihood
Promotion and Skill Development
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|
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2014
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6th
NCSE: Rethinking Development:
Strengthening the Grassroots
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|
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2015
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7th
NCSE: Young Changemakers: Youth and
Social Entrepreneurship
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|
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2016
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8th
NCSE: Social Innovations: Changing
Lives and Society
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|
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2017
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9th
NCSE: Entrepreneurship for Environmental
Sustainability
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|
As the
convener/ organizer of these conferences (and as a recent entrant into the
sector), the conference was also a part of my personal learning journey. While
organizing them, not only I had the opportunity to interact with and learn from
some remarkable changemakers, we also experimented and fine-tuned the
conference to make it an inclusive “learning space” for all. This note/ paper is based on personal reflections
on designing, organizing and learning about the sector from these conferences.
Since the
genesis and rationale of the conference is tied to my learning journey, I will
briefly narrate the personal context of the NCSEs.
A
Personal Note
Unlike many
of my contemporaries, my professional engagement to social sector is rather
recent. It was only in 2005, I got exposed to the social sector, and more
specifically to the field of social entrepreneurship. This happened when a small
team from Ashoka: Innovators for the Public visited XLRI as a part of
their roadshow across some campuses to promote education of social
entrepreneurship. During the interactions, they described how various Ashoka
Fellows were using entrepreneurial strategies to solve critical social problems;
I also got a chance of interacting with one of Ashoka’s recent fellows, Vineet
Rai (Founder of Aavishkaar) who was part of the team – and to get to understand
what social entrepreneurs do.
That meeting
aroused my interest in the sector, and, besides starting a course on social
entrepreneurship for our students, it also led to many other interesting forays
in my career. These included compiling a list of social entrepreneurship
courses in India for Ashoka, a couple of consultancy projects for social
ventures, starting an online discussion group on social entrepreneurship, becoming
part of the assessment team for India NGO Awards, etc. The idea of organizing a conference on social
entrepreneurship came from one such exploration.
To understand
the sector better, in 2007 (and then for next two years again) I decided to attend
the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, which is organized every year
at the Said Business School, University of Oxford. The Forum brings together more
than 600 social entrepreneurs and sector professionals from 40-50 countries across
the world to share their experiences, learn from each other and form
partnerships. It is a large and stimulating three-day event packed with
theme-based sessions, interactive workshops, keynotes by global leaders,
felicitation of Skoll Social Entrepreneurs of the Year, etc. Besides the
obvious intellectual take-away from attending the Forum, what struck me was
that there were many Indian social entrepreneurs and changemakers among the
speakers, awardees and resource persons. It was an irony that despite having so many
globally recognized and felicitated social entrepreneurs, we didn’t have a
similar forum in India where they can share their stories and connect and learn
from each other. In our discussions, they also felt the need for such a forum
in India, since it will help in strengthening the social entrepreneurship
ecosystem. It was this observation and conversations which inspired the idea of
creating a similar platform for the social entrepreneurs in India.
Reflections
and Learning
In
retrospect, organizing these conferences turned out to be an adventure. Designing
the event around a theme (and sub-themes) required searching for social
entrepreneurs whose work exemplified innovative perspective to the topic - and
thus discovering more about the sector with each conference. Moreover, the
conference also brought me in touch with other forums, experts, social
ventures, consultative meetings, etc., which greatly facilitated helped me in
learning and appreciating the contours of this emerging field of practice. Over
the years, this journey gave me a sort of ring-side view of the sector as it
kept on evolving and my own understanding of the social entrepreneurship became
more nuanced. There were a number of things which I learned, but there were
four major insights which I would share here.
1. Emergence of social entrepreneurship as a
sector
In 2009, besides the 1st
NCSE, three other national level conferences/ events on social entrepreneurship
were also organized for the first time: Intellecap’s Sankalp Forum,
Khemka Foundation’s Social Entrepreneurship Summit, and Villgro’s Unconvention.
While each had somewhat different design
and focus, yet they had a common purpose of bringing the social entrepreneurs
and sector professionals together in a common forum to build the ecosystem. This
may look like a coincidence but clearly, even though planning independently, the
organizers had come to the same conclusion: the social entrepreneurial sector
had reached a critical mass and reach to require such forums for building and
strengthening the ecosystem.
In retrospect, it does seem that
the period of 2005-2010 saw a sudden spurt in activities and initiatives
related to social entrepreneurship in India (see Figure 1).
In their study of the landscape of social enterprises in India, Allen et al
(2012) also noted:
“Nearly half of the enterprises
in our survey have been operational for less than three years, and nearly 80%
launched operations in 2007 or later. The take-off appears to have occurred in
2005-2006 (p. 12).”
Figure 1: Showing sudden increase in awareness about
social entrepreneurship in India during 2005-06
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Even prior to 2005, the social
entrepreneurial sector was growing, but these were isolated initiatives with
limited reach and visibility. However, during the 2005-10, one saw a sudden emergence
of diverse initiatives and organizations which would form the support ecosystem
for the sector. Besides the new funding and investing organizations (e.g.,
Elevar Equity, Ennovent fund, Acuman Fund India, etc.), there were four major
areas of the social entrepreneurial ecosystem which saw significant growth
during this period:
a. Incubation support: While, some social incubators, such as Dasra
and Villgro were already in existence by then, during 2005-10, many new
incubation centers for social ventures started emerging. For instance, IIT-Madras launched the Rural
Technology Business Incubator (RTBI) to provide incubation to start-ups
which leveraged ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) to impact
rural/underserved societal segments; UnLtd India started as an incubator for
early stage social entrepreneurs to help them scale up and accelerate their
impact; Deshpande Foundation was established in Hubli-Dharward to nurture
social leaders and nurture and promote social enterprises based innovation
relevant to local needs; IIM-Ahmedabad launched the Centre for Innovation
Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) to incubate, mentor and fund innovative
start-ups, which can bring about societal change in areas like energy,
environment, agriculture, healthcare and affordable technology, etc.
b. Academic and non-academic courses and
fellowships: The “arrival” of the sector was also heralded in the launch of
many initiatives to create a pipeline of talent by equipping young people with
sensitivity, knowledge and skills required to solve social problems. On the
academic side, during 2006 and 2007, courses in social entrepreneurship were
added to the curriculum in XLRI Jamshedpur, IIM Ahmedabad, IRMA Anand, XIM
Bhubneshwar and IIFM Bhopal; TISS Mumbai launched a 2-year full-time Masters
program in social entrepreneurship, and in a unique collaboration IIT-Madras
tied up with Villgro (a social venture and incubator) to co-design and offer a
course on social entrepreneurship to the engineering students.
In
addition, this period also saw the takeoff of many non-academic, hands-on
programs to sensitize and equip youth as changemaker to deal with social
problems. For instance, Piramal Foundation’s Gandhi Fellowship, ICICI
Fellowship, Central Himalayan Rural Action Group’s Swadesh Ki Khoj
Fellowship etc. were long duration immersion programs, ranging from one to
two years with the aim of building a cadre of social leaders who can bring
about change. Similarly, Pravah, a social venture and Ashoka’s Youth
venture tied up to create the Change Loom Program to support young
people which were actively promoting social change. The first Jagriti Yatra,
a unique annual fortnight long train journey for youth across India also
commenced in December 2010, which not only exposed the 350-400 youth to the
social realities and role models, but also incubates their social ventures.
c. Awards, competitions and conferences: Besides
the conferences mentioned earlier, during this period, the sector also
witnessed started greater visibility through other initiatives which identified
and showcased social entrepreneurs. For instance, in2008 the annual TIE
Entrepreneurship Summit was on the theme of inclusive entrepreneurship with
the key-note address on social entrepreneurship. Similarly, Social
Entrepreneur of the Year Award and India NGO Awards were instituted
during 2005 and 2006 respectively. Not only they searched and brought the work
of many social entrepreneurs into limelight, the award ceremonies themselves
were high-profile events, which widely covered in print and electronic media.
The
other visible change was in the focus of “business plan competitions” organized
by IITs and management institutions, which started inviting social business
plans. For instance, ISB Hyderabad
started organizing GSVC (Global Social Venture Competition) for India,
and also launched an annual competition iDiya; IIT-Madras started
organizing Genesis social entrepreneurship competition to
identify socially relevant innovative ideas and ventures and provide them
funding, incubation and mentoring support.
d. Media and publications: A major role in “mainstreaming” of social
entrepreneurship was played by boutique media and publications which had
started emerging during this period. Some of the key developments, for
instance, were the launch of three dedicated webportals, The Better india,
ThinkChange India, The Weekend Leader and YourStory, which featured
stories of little knows social entrepreneurs and changemakers, information
about the upcoming events, emerging social initiatives, etc.; CNBC TV18
started covering the social entrepreneur of the year awards, and featured
stories of the finalists; YourStory and CNBC-TV18 also partnered
to create a regular show, Sociopreneurs, as a part of latter’s popular
Young Turks program; Outlook Business, a mainstream business magazine,
started an annual issue covering social entrepreneurs and social enterprises in
2009, and so on.
2. There is no one model
Designing the conference also
resulted in grappling with some conceptual dilemmas about the nature of social
entrepreneurship itself. For instance,
·
How does one
differentiate between a regular NGO from social entrepreneurship, when some of
the acknowledged social entrepreneurs (e.g., Ela Bhatt of SEWA. Bunker
Roy of Barefoot College, Joe Madiath of Gram Vikas, etc.) had
founded ventures which are essentially NGOs?
·
Can social
entrepreneurial ventures be both for-profit and not-for-profit?
·
Do
corporates who provide products and services which meet a social need (e.g.,
safe drinking water, solar energy products, etc.) also qualify to be called
social entrepreneurial ventures?
·
What about
social activists such as Aruna Roy (for her efforts resulted in the Right to
Information Act), Jockin Arputham (who has been advocating the rights of
slum dwellers), or Arbind Singh (whose work with street vendors brought the
The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street
Vending) Act, 2014, etc.) - and who have been recognized and felicitated as
social entrepreneurs? etc.
Exploring these questions led to
two important insights: Firstly, social entrepreneurship, like any form of
entrepreneurship, is a post-facto phenomenon. People are called
entrepreneurs only when they succeed and are recognized – otherwise they are
called failures. In fact, many of our speakers shared that they even learned
about the term “social entrepreneur” only when they applied or got were
selected for an award or felicitation.
The other realization was that
much of the public and media discourse on social entrepreneurship focused more
on the “social” part of the social entrepreneurship with little attention to
what is “entrepreneurial” in social entrepreneurship. In fact, even when the entrepreneurial aspect
was discussed, it was mostly narrowed down to establishment of a for-profit
business venture with social impact. While a for-profit new business is one
form of entrepreneurship, it is not the only form. As Drucker (1986) had observed:
“…all
new small business have many factors in common. But to be entrepreneurial, an
enterprise has to have special characteristics over and above being new and
small. Indeed, entrepreneurs are a minority among new businesses. They create
something new, something different; they change or transmute values (p. 36).”
In identifying social
entrepreneurs for the conference we followed the wider definition of
entrepreneurship as per the classical entrepreneurship theory of by
Jean-Baptiste Say (Dees, 1998), Joseph Schumpeter (1934) and Peter Drucker
(1986), etc. In a nutshell, the theory says that entrepreneurs create social
and economic value/ wealth by bringing transformative changes in the society
and economy - and they do this by doing two things:
a. they shift resources from areas of low yield
or productivity to areas of high yield or productivity (e.g., an entrepreneur
who connects isolated rural artisans to more lucrative markets, or uses a
‘waste’ like rice husk to produce electricity), and;
b. they identify gaps or unmet needs in the
society/ markets, and then innovate new products/ services to address these
needs (e.g., an entrepreneur who provides skill training to drop-out youth who
are looking for jobs, or
Following from this
understanding, our search and selection of social entrepreneurs for the
conference was based on three basic criteria: (1) they created new value/
social wealth by addressing a critical social problem, (2) they innovated a
solution to solve the problem, and (3) that solution had an impact which was
sustainable.
Not only such wide-angle understanding
of social entrepreneurship was validated by the profiles of individuals who
were recognized and felicitated as social entrepreneurs (e.g., by Ashoka:
Innovators for the Public, Social Entrepreneur of the Year Awards, Schwab
Social Entrepreneur Awards, etc.), it also allowed the conference to
witness a wide variety of manifestations of social entrepreneurship. Besides
the diversity of their legal entity (for-profit private limited companies,
society, trust, etc.), the social entrepreneurial ventures also differed widely
in their strategies and innovations to address the social issues. Across the around 200 social entrepreneurs who
participated in the conference, there were at least four different “archetypes”
social entrepreneurship.
a. The for-profit social enterprises which offered socially useful product or
service to the under-served segments (e.g., SELCO providing solar
lighting systems at affordable cost, or Mother Earth providing better
livelihoods to rural producers by connecting them to the markets).
b. The social service providers who provided essential services and
provisions to those who needed them sustainably at a large scale (e.g., Goonj
collects, sorts and distributes clothes across the country, or Pratham
provides high-quality free primary education to out-of-school children through
volunteers).
c. The social activists who through their advocacy and social mobilization could change
the system which was causing the problem in the first place (e.g., the work of
Arbind Singh which led to The Street Vendor Act, 2014, mentioned earlier)
d. The ecosystem builders who provided specialized support services
(e.g., technical and advisory support, access to funds and resources,
visibility through media, etc.) to other social entrepreneurial organizations –
some of those examples are mentioned in the previous section.
3. Multiple meanings of “Scaling”
Given the size of the country,
and the magnitude of its problems, it is logical to conclude that we need large-scale
solutions. However, one soon realized that social entrepreneurs look at “scale”
quite differently than the investors, funders, and even the award giving
foundations. For the latter, scale of
solution could be achieved only by scaling of the enterprise/ venture.
The focus of the social entrepreneurs, however, was on scaling of the impact,
which could be achieved by a variety of strategies. Over the years, I learned/
created a mental vocabulary to distinguish among three broad kinds of scaling.
a. Scaling-up:
For many social ventures it was possible to impact a larger population only by
increasing their outreach to provide the relevant product or service – and they
do so by managing their operations efficiently and leveraging their existing
resources. A good example of this was the Aravind Eye Care System which
started as an 11-bed hospital to eradicate needless blindness among poor, and
grew into world’s largest eye care facility with 11 hospitals, and performs
400,000 ophthalmic surgeries and laser procedures annually, besides attending
to about 2.7 million patients in OPD. Two-third of these surgeries are provided
free of cost.
b. Scaling-out:
Given the scarcity of financial, technical and human resources in many social
ventures in India (and elsewhere), often it is not possible for them to scale
up in the manner as described above. Instead, they scale out by promoting
replication of their model through partnerships to maximize their impact. For
instance, SELCO India, instead of expanding its operations across India,
incubates, supports and partners with social ventures which provide solar
lighting products to rural and marginalized segments.
Similarly,
many social entrepreneurs are able to increase their impact by partnering with
like-minded agencies with a larger outreach (such as government program or
corporate sector oganisations) who are able to replicate their models. For
instance, Digital Green, which bridges the information-gap for small
marginal farmers through locally-produced videos of good agricultural practices
was able to increase its outreach manifold by partnering with government’s
National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM).
c. Scaling deep: This stance of scaling actually turns the
conventional meaning of scaling on its head. Among our speakers, there were
also many (e.g., Satyan Mishra of Drishtee, Kalyan and Anita Paul of Grassroots,
Rashmi Bharti and Rajnish Jain of Avani, etc.), who were content to
remain a “local changemaker” for a specific community or region. Instead of
reaching out to a larger number of customers/ beneficiaries, their focus was on
engaging with the same community in more depth, and addressing the multiple (and
often emerging) needs of the community. It was actually an insight when one of
them remarked, “Shouldn’t we look at the scale of impact from the eyes of the
community we serve? If people from 10-20 villages, where hardly anyone has ever
ventured beyond a radius of 50k, have now better access to healthcare,
education, energy, sustainable livelihoods, etc., through community owned and
managed institutions, we have managed to transform their world, even if
not the world!!”
4. Ideological moorings of social entrepreneurs
In hindsight, it seems obvious
that social entrepreneurs who are engaged in creating a “better future” would
have a vision of that future, which is better than the present and from other alternative
futures. And in committing to that vision they have to make a choice which is
essentially ideological in nature.
This understanding evolved from
the initial observations that a large number of our speakers had strong and
articulated ideological anchors; they were either rooted in Gandhian or Marxist
thoughts, or had actively participated in social movements such as JP Movement,
labour struggles, etc. Even the younger and more urban social entrepreneurs,
who may not have had this background, too had strong convictions about the vision
they were following. Interestingly, not only these ideologies diverse in
nature, but often (when the social entrepreneur could articulate it) they were
also mutually contradictory. Nevertheless, it was clear that their actions were
guided by this explicit or implicit ideology.
Searching for the commonalities
across these ideological visions, I could identify two common strands across
the social entrepreneurs:
a. Belief in possibility of change and human
potential: Underlying the somewhat
“unreasonable” goals of the social entrepreneurs was a belief that despite
adversities and lack of resources/ support, it is possible to create
transformations in a social system. For
instance, almost all social ventures were based on the assumption that even the
poor, marginalized, and illiterate have a vision of personal change, and have the
capacity and resources to make it happen. This belief guides the social
entrepreneurs to identify and leverage on the resources within the community,
build capacities where they were lacking, and aim towards creating more
empowered and self-managed institutions and processes.
b. Role of self as accountable to community: Correspondingly, they saw themselves not as
creators of change, but as participants and facilitators in the change process.
Their actions and choices were mostly guided by a sense of obligation and
accountability to the community.
There
was perhaps another more practical reason for this sense of accountability. Unlike
the business entrepreneurs, markets do not work well for social entrepreneurs
in providing a feedback on their actions. When one is in the “business” of
creating social value, it is difficult to evaluate and monitor the intangibles
such as social improvements, public good (or harm), or benefits for the
marginalized, etc. This made it imperative for most of them to seek regular
feedback from the community they served, and to develop processes to assess the
extent to which their efforts made the desirable impact in meeting the needs of
the community.
References:
Allan
S. et al (2012). On the path
to sustainability and scale: The study of India’s social enterprise landscape. Mumbai,
Intellecap.
Drucker,
P. F. (1986). Innovation and entrepreneurship: Practice and principles.
New Delhi: East-West Press Pvt Ltd.
Schumpeter,
J. (1934). The theory of economic development. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.