Tag Archives: Social Entrepreneur

First-hand Village Level Perspectives

Posted on August 16, 2008 | Leave a comment

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to visit the Deshpande Foundation’s Social Entrepreneurship Sandbox in the Hubli/Dharwad area. The Foundation was established by Desh Deshpande, who is well known in the US as a serial entrepreneur, and his wife Jaishree. In India, they have focused on their home town of Hubli/Dharwad in Northern Karnataka to conduct an innovative experiment in accelerating social entrepreneurship in rural India. Continue reading →

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Posted in Agricultural Development, Hygiene, non-profit, Philanthropy, Poverty, Rural Development, Social Ecosystem, Social Entrepreneur, water and sanitation

Tagged Deshpande Foundation, Foundation, Hubli, India, Karnataka, NGO, Sandbox, self help groups, Social Ecosystem, Social Entrepreneur, social entrepreneurship, Social Impact, social Innovation, Social Investment, toilets, village life

Models for Early Stage Funding

Posted on August 15, 2008 | Leave a comment

Several outfits, that I am counseling, are looking at the traditional VC route to raise funds. Sometimes people find this at odds with a socially focused business. The term Social Entrepreneur provides a broad umbrella that covers a number of different types of organizations – ranging from non-profits, to socially focused businesses (as defined by Yunus) to for-profits that have solutions that address a social issue in a major way. Continue reading →

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Posted in Philanthropy, Social Business, Social Ecosystem, Social Entrepreneur, Venture Capital, venture philanthropy

Tagged angel investor, Early Stage Funding, for-profit, foundations, grants, new business model, non-profit, philanthropist, Philanthropy, Social Business, Social Ecosystem, Social Entrepreneur, social entrepreneurship, Social Investment, startup, Venture Capital, venture fund, venture philanthropy, Vinit Nijhawan

Entrepreneur’s Notebook

Posted on August 13, 2008 | Leave a comment

I have spent the past several years counseling a number of startups and emerging social entrepreneurs. As I have gone over numerous business plans, ideas strategies, I have been trying to distill some of the learnings from the growing pains of these various nascent enterprises. I hope very soon to write about this on this blog. Continue reading →

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Posted in Social Ecosystem, Social Entrepreneur

Tagged Entrepreneur, Management advice, New Business, New Venture, Social Business, Social Entrepreneur, social entrepreneurship, startup, Steven Gold, Venture Capital

7 Rules of Low Cost Design

Posted on August 11, 2008 | Leave a comment

I came across this article that summarizes Amy Smith’s philosophy of design for low cost solutions

Here are her 7 key points. You can read the entire article on Popular Mechanics.

Try living for a week on $2 a day.
Listen to the right people.
Do the hard work needed to find a simple solution.
Create “transparent” technologies
Make it inexpensive.
If you want to make something 10 times cheaper, remove 90 percent of the material
Provide skills, not just finished technologies.

Some of Amy’s inventions and designs are also described with diagrams in another article Small, Low-Tech Inventions for Big, World-Changing Problems on their website. Amy is an editorial advisor for Popular Mechanics.

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Posted in BOP, Education, international development, Poverty, Rural Development, Social Ecosystem, social Innovation, sustainable development

Tagged Amy Smith, BOP, Education, innovation, international development, invention, Low Cost Design, MIT, Poverty, Social Entrepreneur, Social Impact, social Innovation, sustainable development

Tapan Parikh – Technology Review’s Humanitarian of the Year 2007

Posted on August 8, 2008 | Leave a comment

I had the pleasure of meeting Tapan Parikh a few weeks ago when he presented on a panel at a conference to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of my alma mater, IIT Bombay. The panel focused on the latest trends in technology with the rest of the panelists discussing emerging areas in nanotechnology, biomedicine and energy. Tapan provided a refreshingly different viewpoint that emphasized the needs of the end user in developing countries. By harnessing technology to make things simpler, Tapan has provided platforms that make the daily grind of field workers in rural parts of the world a lot easier. Continue reading →

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Posted in BOP, Information Technology, international development, micro-finance, mobile technology, Poverty, Social Ecosystem, Social Entrepreneur, social Innovation, sustainable development