The entrepreneurship and innovation hub of Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) – NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) has launched its social ventures incubator to exclusively nurture early stage non-profit organisations.

Called NSRCEL Social, this first of its kind incubator in the country is looking to help social ventures who have the potential of delivering impact and offer connects, funding and other wraparound services as is being currently done under the ‘for profit’ model.

The social ventures incubation programme is currently supported by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.

NSRCEL Social has selected eight early-stage organisations for incubation over the next 18 months. The incubator aims to address the lack of an effective support system for early stage NGOs that are offered little or no technical assistance for fund raising, legal issues and operational challenges.

“Our objective with this programme is to understand the processes by which we can incubate scalable NGOs. Scalability is difficult to achieve for for-profit start-ups, especially for NGOs. Having said that, some NGOs in India and abroad have done this successfully. Our intention is to motivate nascent non-profit start-ups to build scalability DNA into their organisational culture. We are attempting to do this in a two-step process: through Launchpad (a quarterly, cohort based 12-week pre-incubation program designed for early stage entrepreneurs) we helped the start-ups decrease their scope of problems they would like to address and in our two-year incubation process, we will help the start-ups build scalable solutions,” said Dr Suresh Bhagavatula, Chairperson, Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Development at NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore.

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