Targeting the “Right” Crowd

Stakeholders from across the Indian social enterprise landscape met last Friday and Saturday in Mumbai to understand each other’s work in promoting entrepreneurship, to share key learnings from our work, and to identify synergies between our organizations and how to take these forward. A lot of buzz words are encapsulated in that one sentence, I realize. But, there is a definite need in Indian social enterprise to coalesce and try to work on the same plane, or at least in complementary ways.

The meeting began from the premise that in order to work together, we need to get to know each other. Even though many of us already “know of” one another, it’s a different game to try to put your head to the task of figuring out how to work together.

So, what did we accomplish? And more importantly, what needs to be done? From the conversation, the biggest challenge to both entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship alike is talent—in this case, finding a pipeline of social entrepreneurs. Contrary to what many believe, while India is a hive of activity, it is not doing a good job of encouraging or incentivizing students to become entrepreneurs.

Given the overtly competitive education environment in India, any student that has the opportunity to go to a passable school is also expected to become an earner for their family.  From the standpoint of risk or salary, becoming an entrepreneur is not an Indian parent’s first choice of career for their children. Indian society is structured to prize the lawyer, the doctor, and the engineer, not the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is a risk. Working for Bharti Airtel is not.

So what are we doing wrong? How do we incentivize entrepreneurship? How do we remove the fear of “not being able to pay the bills?” We need to inspire youth to actually follow through on their dreams of starting their own enterprise, of becoming an entrepreneur.

Enter Jagriti Yatra, Going2School, Sevankur, and NeN, four fabulous organizations working to change this age-old belief by inspiring the spirit of entrepreneurship in young people. Jagriti Yatra aims to awaken the spirit of enterprise in young people by taking them on a 9,000 kilometer train journey through the width and breadth of India to meet role models and entrepreneurs. It acts as both an external and internal journey, forcing its participants to look inside themselves: “service is a choice, not a sacrifice.” Going2School, among other things, aims to link education and entrepreneurship through multimedia, proving that independent communication can change things. They aim to reach 100 million young people and create a supportive environment for entrepreneurship. Sevankur is an open platform for those that want to make a difference in the lives of others, providing an entry platform for students from professional institutions who are committed to long-term social change. NeN, the National Entrepreneurship Network, builds on that fact that entrepreneurship in India has largely been concentrated in certain communities. Through its extensive university network (515 participating universities), it aims to get more young people inspired to become entrepreneurs and to help build their entrepreneurial knowledge and skill-set.

In a perfect world, these four organizations would create a steady pipeline of entrepreneurs for the next organizations – Ashoka’s Youth Venture, Change Looms, and UnLtd India – three organizations incubating entrepreneurs in India, providing capacity-building support and occasionally funding. But this is not a perfect world, and the greatest challenge seems to be converting ideas into action, supporting visionary individuals to take the entrepreneurial plunge.

Is it that we are promoting entrepreneurship to the wrong people?

Entrepreneurship is often promoted to the business school crowd, but is this the “right” crowd? Often it is said that business school graduates are intrapreneurs, i.e., they are great managers, but not great entrepreneurs. They have salary expectations, they are concerned about the reputation of their employer. This discourages venturing out on your own with nothing to back you but your great idea, creative mind, and skill to convince people that you “have the answer.” Maybe, in fact, what we we should do is change our target audience. This, among other things, will be one of the major topics of conversation among this group of sector stakeholders in the months to come.

In order to tip a sector, you need to build an ecosystem. And this is what we will concentrate on, creating a supportive and enabling environment for entrepreneurship and for the next great idea to “take off.”