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'Tata Social Enterprise Challenge' to Support India's Best and Brightest

Kirsten Spainhower's picture

The Tata Group, in partnership with the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC),has launched the ‘Tata Social Enterprise Challenge’, a quest to find India’s most promising social enterprises. The goal of the challenge is to create an ecosystem for social entrepreneurship and encourage sustainable, scalable and measurable social impact. Selected social entrepreneurs will be offered mentorship support, funding opportunities and an opportunity to be incubated at IIM Calcutta’s Incubation Centre

Teams who either have an early stage venture (not older than 3 years) or a promising idea with a plan that can create sustainable social impact can submit their business plans online by logging onto http://www.tatasechallenge.org.

Beyond Hero Worship

Jill Richmond's picture

Julie Battilana of HBSSupporters of social entrepreneurship often cite examples of “heroes” who have successfully built organizations to solve social problems on a global scale. But social entrepreneurship also includes many efforts to fix targeted, local problems rather than working toward large-scale global change. An increasing number of social entrepreneurs are experimenting with ways to use commercially generated revenue to grow and maintain their social impact.

These findings are part of one of the most robust quantitative studies of social enterprise to date. Undertaken by Harvard Business School Associate Professor Julie Battilana and her colleague Matthew Lee, a doctoral student at Harvard Business School, they analyzed 6 years worth of applicant data from Echoing Green. The purpose of the study is to expand the field of vision beyond “heroic stories” that dominate the discussion on social entrepreneurship. In this interview, they share some initial findings from their research.