Founder of Deshpande Foundation highlights the importance of partnership, capacity building, sustainability and impact to give back to the social sector as a corollary to business at a special talk at IIMB on Jan 28
JANUARY 28, 2016: At a special session on social enterprise, innovation and effective CSR, organized by IIM Bangalore and Deshpande Foundation today, philanthropist and entrepreneur Gururaj Deshpande spent an hour discussing ‘partnership for social impact’.
Highlighting the importance of ecosystem building in driving social innovation, he offered a brief overview of the Deshpande Foundation’s ‘Sandbox’ approach, which is to create an environment that supports innovative approaches to tackle social challenges. “You have to connect innovations with real problems. Creating a vibrant community, as against an impoverished community, is a good and sustainable way of solving problems. In the impoverished community, problems get chronic and hard to unknot. As a result, people feel victimized and complain. The Sandbox approach gives people the taste of what it is like to be a problem solver as against being a complainer,” he said to an audience comprising people from NGOs, civil society and academia.
He further explained that the Sandbox worked at getting people to own solutions. “In India, there are a lot of great ideas but no impact. The reason is twofold: when people innovate in a vacuum, solutions are not appropriate.”
Describing the Deshpande Foundation as a “living lab”, he said people came to the foundation with ideas and worked at making their ideas scalable and self-sustaining.
In his address, IIMB Director Dr. Sushil Vachani, who is a Trustee of the Deshpande Foundation, addressed the challenge of skill building among the nation’s youth. “The country can address challenges of education through partnership between civil society and government. All elements are in place, opportunities are there, but due to lack of coordination, solutions are often not possible,” he said, drawing attention to IIMB’s commitment to creating social impact and its well-accepted Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) programme, which makes top quality management education accessible to all. IIMB has launched 15 MOOCs in management, delivered on the MIT-Harvard platform edX, and these free online courses, ranging from accounting to statistics for business to predictive analysis has seen over 1,40,00 people enrol from 185 countries.
The keynote addresses were followed by a panel discussion on ‘Building an ecosystem where social enterprise and innovation can thrive’ that saw Dr. Deshpande, Dr. Vachani and Naveen Jha, CEO, Deshpande Foundation, India take questions from Srikrishna Sridhar Murthy, CEO of Sattva. On the difference between entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship, Dr. Deshpande said for-profit entrepreneurs leveraged a powerful tool called feedback for their products and services from paying customers and had to be competitive to achieve execution excellence with little time for compassion. “On the not-for-profit side, there is a huge amount of compassion; the beneficiary does not pay for the product or service and therefore the feedback loop is not very strong. So they are not very sure if what they are doing is very meaningful. Money has to come from the donor, so the model is not very clear. Therefore, it becomes critical to blend the execution excellence of the for-profit enterprise with the compassion from the not-for-profit side.”
On whether the Sandbox model was replicable, Dr. Deshpande said that co-opting people with a passion for solving problems and building that group was an approach that worked well. He also stressed that collaboration happened when all parties were strong. “The non-profit sector has to be strong enough to be able to stand up to collaborate with corporates, with innovators, with CSR initiatives,” he said, adding that while failure is an essential part of the innovative ecosystem, a good ecosystem is one where you fail small and fail fast. His key message to the audience was that people in a community drive change, so efforts must be made to expand human capacity.
Discussing how entrepreneurs working with communities and constituencies can partner with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) to take advantage of technology and scale education in these sectors, Dr. Vachani said thanks to technology, one could design courses that are relevant for learners of any profile and thereby create education relevant for the masses. “For that to happen, connectivity and other facilitators are needed. Mix and match what is freely available to teach with assistance. So you can work in partnership, all the way from someone innovating globally to create content that is informed by what’s going on locally,” he explained.
Talking about the learnings from the failures of a few experiments at Sandbox, Naveen said they had learnt how executing locally was critical. “Organizations which have built strong execution teams will flourish, as after the innovation story is over, the execution story has to start.” On the best practices followed by Sandbox for ecosystem creation, he said that it was important to identify stakeholders in the ecosystem and work with each in a distinct manner, understand and build products and services. “As an ecosystem promoter you have to neutralize yourself and remove bias. Collaboration is a value, a transaction, a means of creating impact, synergizing ecosystems and building processes.”
The next panel discussed how corporates and civil society could work together for effective CSR. Anchored by Aarti Mohan from Sattva, the session featured Kshitija Krishnaswamy, Director-Corporate Citizenship, Accenture India; Nikhil Pant, Chief Programme Executive, National Foundation for CSR, Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs (IICA); and Naveen Jha, Deshpande Foundation India.
Kshitija spoke about the key learnings and challenges for corporates in the new framework of partnering with civil society. She said the 2% mandate on CSR, which came into being in 2014, gave structure to CSR and companies like Accenture had to see if they were compliant or if they needed to scale, and if their partners would be able to scale along with them. Hence new strategy had to be formed. “It is important for corporates to recognize that CSR is not just about giving money; it’s important for them to identify players in the ecosystem, test pilot impact, accept failure and adopt course correction, work with partners and build capacity,” she said.
Nikhil spoke about the intent of the mandatory law and observed that Corporate India had to be involved in the nation building process “because government efforts, which are built on the tax-payers money, had not shown the right kind of impact”. He said companies had taken time to understand the importance and relevance of CSR. “As per data, around 75% compliance has happened. Now there is a focus on the impact of measure of work they are doing. Capacity building initiatives are now required for NGOs and orientation is required for corporates so that impact is the next step.”
Naveen spoke about the capacity of civil society to partner with corporates. “In the last 30 to 40 years civil society has grown in the country, so the corporate world can bank on it. There is no dearth of resources and good solutions,” he added.
Founder of Deshpande Foundation highlights the importance of partnership, capacity building, sustainability and impact to give back to the social sector as a corollary to business at a special talk at IIMB on Jan 28
JANUARY 28, 2016: At a special session on social enterprise, innovation and effective CSR, organized by IIM Bangalore and Deshpande Foundation today, philanthropist and entrepreneur Gururaj Deshpande spent an hour discussing ‘partnership for social impact’.
Highlighting the importance of ecosystem building in driving social innovation, he offered a brief overview of the Deshpande Foundation’s ‘Sandbox’ approach, which is to create an environment that supports innovative approaches to tackle social challenges. “You have to connect innovations with real problems. Creating a vibrant community, as against an impoverished community, is a good and sustainable way of solving problems. In the impoverished community, problems get chronic and hard to unknot. As a result, people feel victimized and complain. The Sandbox approach gives people the taste of what it is like to be a problem solver as against being a complainer,” he said to an audience comprising people from NGOs, civil society and academia.
He further explained that the Sandbox worked at getting people to own solutions. “In India, there are a lot of great ideas but no impact. The reason is twofold: when people innovate in a vacuum, solutions are not appropriate.”
Describing the Deshpande Foundation as a “living lab”, he said people came to the foundation with ideas and worked at making their ideas scalable and self-sustaining.
In his address, IIMB Director Dr. Sushil Vachani, who is a Trustee of the Deshpande Foundation, addressed the challenge of skill building among the nation’s youth. “The country can address challenges of education through partnership between civil society and government. All elements are in place, opportunities are there, but due to lack of coordination, solutions are often not possible,” he said, drawing attention to IIMB’s commitment to creating social impact and its well-accepted Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) programme, which makes top quality management education accessible to all. IIMB has launched 15 MOOCs in management, delivered on the MIT-Harvard platform edX, and these free online courses, ranging from accounting to statistics for business to predictive analysis has seen over 1,40,00 people enrol from 185 countries.
The keynote addresses were followed by a panel discussion on ‘Building an ecosystem where social enterprise and innovation can thrive’ that saw Dr. Deshpande, Dr. Vachani and Naveen Jha, CEO, Deshpande Foundation, India take questions from Srikrishna Sridhar Murthy, CEO of Sattva. On the difference between entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship, Dr. Deshpande said for-profit entrepreneurs leveraged a powerful tool called feedback for their products and services from paying customers and had to be competitive to achieve execution excellence with little time for compassion. “On the not-for-profit side, there is a huge amount of compassion; the beneficiary does not pay for the product or service and therefore the feedback loop is not very strong. So they are not very sure if what they are doing is very meaningful. Money has to come from the donor, so the model is not very clear. Therefore, it becomes critical to blend the execution excellence of the for-profit enterprise with the compassion from the not-for-profit side.”
On whether the Sandbox model was replicable, Dr. Deshpande said that co-opting people with a passion for solving problems and building that group was an approach that worked well. He also stressed that collaboration happened when all parties were strong. “The non-profit sector has to be strong enough to be able to stand up to collaborate with corporates, with innovators, with CSR initiatives,” he said, adding that while failure is an essential part of the innovative ecosystem, a good ecosystem is one where you fail small and fail fast. His key message to the audience was that people in a community drive change, so efforts must be made to expand human capacity.
Discussing how entrepreneurs working with communities and constituencies can partner with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) to take advantage of technology and scale education in these sectors, Dr. Vachani said thanks to technology, one could design courses that are relevant for learners of any profile and thereby create education relevant for the masses. “For that to happen, connectivity and other facilitators are needed. Mix and match what is freely available to teach with assistance. So you can work in partnership, all the way from someone innovating globally to create content that is informed by what’s going on locally,” he explained.
Talking about the learnings from the failures of a few experiments at Sandbox, Naveen said they had learnt how executing locally was critical. “Organizations which have built strong execution teams will flourish, as after the innovation story is over, the execution story has to start.” On the best practices followed by Sandbox for ecosystem creation, he said that it was important to identify stakeholders in the ecosystem and work with each in a distinct manner, understand and build products and services. “As an ecosystem promoter you have to neutralize yourself and remove bias. Collaboration is a value, a transaction, a means of creating impact, synergizing ecosystems and building processes.”
The next panel discussed how corporates and civil society could work together for effective CSR. Anchored by Aarti Mohan from Sattva, the session featured Kshitija Krishnaswamy, Director-Corporate Citizenship, Accenture India; Nikhil Pant, Chief Programme Executive, National Foundation for CSR, Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs (IICA); and Naveen Jha, Deshpande Foundation India.
Kshitija spoke about the key learnings and challenges for corporates in the new framework of partnering with civil society. She said the 2% mandate on CSR, which came into being in 2014, gave structure to CSR and companies like Accenture had to see if they were compliant or if they needed to scale, and if their partners would be able to scale along with them. Hence new strategy had to be formed. “It is important for corporates to recognize that CSR is not just about giving money; it’s important for them to identify players in the ecosystem, test pilot impact, accept failure and adopt course correction, work with partners and build capacity,” she said.
Nikhil spoke about the intent of the mandatory law and observed that Corporate India had to be involved in the nation building process “because government efforts, which are built on the tax-payers money, had not shown the right kind of impact”. He said companies had taken time to understand the importance and relevance of CSR. “As per data, around 75% compliance has happened. Now there is a focus on the impact of measure of work they are doing. Capacity building initiatives are now required for NGOs and orientation is required for corporates so that impact is the next step.”
Naveen spoke about the capacity of civil society to partner with corporates. “In the last 30 to 40 years civil society has grown in the country, so the corporate world can bank on it. There is no dearth of resources and good solutions,” he added.