Entrepreneurship Notes

Your Assignment for the week will be a bit more challenging. We ask you to select one of the following four social problems and to try to identify an opportunity for turning the problem into an opportunity for social innovation. 1. Only one in three blind people is employed. 2. Boys with ethnic minority backgrounds tend to drop out of school early and are at higher risk of unemployment. 3. Poor people do not have essential resources such as access to clean drinking water due to a lack of support infrastructure. 4. Producers of handicraft often have to work in an environment in which they do not have access to electricity making production unreliable. My answer: I would like to provide solutions to problems faced by handicraft producers in Africa. Producers of Africa have no access to electricity, but they have the skills to produce handicrafts which can be used to solve the problem. When producers have access to electricity, production of handicrafts will be reliable and this will enab...

Anirudh Agarwal, Research Fellow at Copenhagen Business School Grameen Veolia is part of the family of the Grameen Bank. Bangladesh lies in South Asia. It is around Ganges. And the water there is not clean and contains lot of arsenic & other heavy materials which cause physiological problems when consumed. The Grameen Bank knew what the social problems are, knew how the market is. But they didn’t have the technologies. So, they found a Veolia and formed a joint venture to address these social problems. Identify a social disequilibrium and convert that disequilibrium into an opportunity. And then use a lot of creative means to address that opportunity such that it becomes a sustainable business proposition. Once you have identified a social opportunity. Reach out to people: different stakeholders, politicians, funding agencies, your customers. Find the right set of people to work with and then write a business plan/a project proposal. And then basically look for the right funding ag...

Johanna Mair, Professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin Gram Vikas based in Orissa, India works with mission to bring equality and empower rural womens . Gram Vikas works in the village only if everyone in the village is on board which means that the village, across cast, across gender, has to be on board for Gram Vikas to actually work with them. Gram Vikas started with good intention of helping people in rural areas. But they soon had to understand and learn to twist & tweak their intervention, their innovation to the needs of the population they serve. Initially, they started with providing irrigation to land owners and helping poor farmers. But they learned very quickly that once benefitted from irrigation, land owners don’t stick to their commitment of sharing the benefits. Then they tried to bring dairy products, dairy farming to very remote villages, tribal villages. But they found that tribes actually do not drink milk because it is against their beliefs. What ...

There are four mechanisms that exist that allow identifying opportunities for social enterprises: 1. Identifying hidden complementarities : For example, People with autism spectrum disorder at Specialisterne. Telehandelshuset, a Danish telemarketing house that employs blind people. Staff’s visual impairment results in them having unique listening skills and verbalization abilities. 2. Develop new complementarities : Mind Your Own Business, a social enterprise aimed at boys aged between 11 and 18 years – all of whom have ethnic minority backgrounds. To break from vicious cycle of underachievement at school, unemployment & crime, Mind Your Own Business motivates them to jointly start a micro business that unlocks the latent potential concealed in this target group. Similarly, Melting Pot Foundation for youth in Peru, which teaches food craftsmanship as a way of instilling a spirit of entrepreneurship in its beneficiaries. 3. Eliminate the need for complementary assets : Vestergaard F...

Traditional business theory suggests that firms acquire resources that complement each other. Social entrepreneurs combine resources which do not complement each other – antagonistic assets. For example, Specialisterne is a Danish social innovator company using the characteristics of people with autism spectrum disorder as a competitive advantage in the business market. Thoril Sonne, founder of Specialisterne, who has son with Autism found that not many people with autism are employed and recognized, that not only do people with autism have difficulty, they also have profound abilities. And, he decided to create a company based on the abilities of people with autism. This blog post is based on my learnings from the course on ‘social entrepreneurship’ offered by Copenhagen Business School through Coursera (2014).