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Indian-American investor and serial entrepreneur, Gururaj ‘Desh’ Deshpande is President and Chairman of Sparta Group LLC, a family investment office. He co-chairs a National Council to support US President Barack Obama’s innovation and entrepreneurship strategy and is involved either as the founder, a founding investor or chairman of several companies including Sycamore Networks, Cascade Communications, Coral Networks, Tejas Networks, Cimaron, Webdialogs, Airvana, Sandstone Capital, A123 Systems and Curata. Deshpande spoke to BusinessLine on social entrepreneurship and how it can be scaled. Excerpts:
How is social entrepreneurship evolving in India?
It is evolving well. India has three things coming together for it. First, about 1 per cent of the population, approximately 10 million Indians have global competence as journalists, lawyers, doctors, engineers, scientists, etc.
They are as good as anybody else in the world. Second, the country faces huge problems in multiple areas such as access to food, water, sanitation, healthcare and education.
Third, there is tremendous freedom to operate in India unlike in China.
These 10 million globally competent Indians are using their skills and getting into social enterprise with great passion to make a difference in millions of lives by addressing the huge problems they face.
How can social enterprises succeed when there is little money or profits to be made?
Social entrepreneurs are focused on problem solving and not with making money. Making money is the side effect of bringing about a change in people’s lives.
Those entrepreneurs, who are purely driven by the need to make money, end up failing miserably. While the corporate world lacks compassion because of the pressures of chasing topline and bottomline targets, social enterprises in the country have a lot of compassion, but lack the execution excellence of the corporate world. Also, the feedback loop forces the corporate world to do things that customers need and demand. When you bring execution excellence and the feedback loop to social enterprises, then wonders can happen.
Through the Deshpande Foundation, we work to create an effective ecosystem by engaging with non-profit organisations, academics, corporates and entrepreneurs who are involved with the launch of effective and scalable models of development and have reached more than one million families in northern Karnataka.
The Deshpande Foundation has created Hubli Sandbox, which nurtures sustainable, social entrepreneurship. How do you plan to scale up the Sandbox model in India?
Besides Hubli, the Deshpande Foundation has set up Sandboxes in the US and Canada. We have partnered with Action for India (AFI) to replicate the Hubli Sandbox around the country and recently launched the Kakatiya and Varanasi Sandboxes.
The Sandboxes are dependent on ‘Hub Champions’, the principal agents who leverage social entrepreneurship to create jobs, spur economic growth and foster innovation. AFI’s Hub Champions include Raju Reddy and Phanindra Sama, the duo building the Kakatiya Sandbox in Nizamabad, Telangana, and Dilip Modi, who launched a Sandbox in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh.
At the fourth AFI annual forum in Bengaluru, AFI assembled 100 leading social entrepreneurs working in education, healthcare, energy, livelihood and agriculture from around the country and facilitated interactions with 100 “influencers”, including donors, impact investors, IAS officers, technology executives and policy analysts.
What is your advice to aspiring and budding entrepreneurs?
Once people get the taste of entrepreneurship, there is no looking back. Aspiring entrepreneurs must get the fear of failure out of their systems because life offers no guarantees, whether you are an entrepreneur or not. Second, the only trick is to make sure that you fail small.
Third, figure out how your product or solution is different from others and only work on it if it offers a tangible benefit or proposition to the end customer. Being an entrepreneur is a very empowering experience. Because an entrepreneur identifies a problem that he wants to solve, he then gets passionate about it.
He goes about finding a way to solve the problem that will make the world a better place to live in. The fact that he can create an impact with his product is empowering.
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