The title of the cover story of the March 6, 2010 edition of Outlook Business, a leading business magazine in India: “The New Colours of Venture Capital.” And the tagline: “A new breed of VC funds is looking to invest in social enterprises that deliver developmental benefits, AND, generate decent financial returns.”
So, why is this important? Why do we care? Since the magazine is sitting on thousands of newsstands across India, being read by close to 180,000 people, a whole new segment of Indian society has now heard the term “social enterprise.” This is a good thing, a very good thing. While they may not know exactly what a social enterprise is, at least their interest has been piqued.
And then there is the current issue of Fast Company (March 2010), which highlights The World’s Most Innovative Companies (Facebook is Number 1). In a new 2010 avatar, Fast Company breaks down the list into “Top 10 by Industry.” Interestingly, India and China are separate categories (because they are “industries!”). The great news – four of the top 10 most innovative companies in India are standalone social enterprises or have socially entrepreneurial initiatives. This is not to mention the fact that numerous social enterprises are on Fast Company’s list of “All Stars.”
- Number two, VNL, was founded in 2004, and it “reverse-engineers telecom for the rural poor with solar-powered base stations that can be assembled onto a village home’s rooftop by anybody and operational with mobile service within six hours.”
- Number four, the Godrej Group, “crowdsourced rural villages for design input on its small, affordable ChotuKool refrigerator.”
- Number five, Narayana Hrudayalaya (the No. 3 company on last year’s list for India), honored for its low-cost, high-quality heart surgeries is now “working to extend its clinical expertise to cancer with the launch of Biocon, a 1,400-bed facility providing treatment for head-and-neck, breast, and cervical cancers. Also, last year’s Integrated Telemedicine Project aims to extend the hospital’s health-care reach to all 53 African countries through fiber-optic networks and satellite.”
- Number 8, A Little World, “is transforming the burgeoning mobile-payments sector with innovations that connect rural India to mainstream financial institutions. Its 2003 incubation of Mchek, a mobile-to-mobile payment platform, was later adopted by the state of India and Airtel before it was spun off into a stand-alone business three years later. More recently, its Zero platform, a technology that turns a smartphone, lockbox, and fingerprint scanner into a portable bank branch, aspires to integrate the unbanked masses in rural India.” Disclaimer: A Little World won the Sankalp 2009 High Impact Award for Highly Scalable Models.
This is all interesting to think about. Why were these social enterprises chosen? Are they truly the most innovative companies in the country? Or was it something else? Maybe it’s the tipping point we’ve all been waiting for – more than just social enterprise cronies now looking for a new breed of business, it’s almost a movement that incorporates “social” into its core competency, signaling a new brand of capitalism.
Photo Courtesy Outlook Business
