If you aren’t a consumer focused startup, chances are you will have a hard time attracting investors. And if you are a social startup, then your challenges just doubled. in 2012, the Tata Group, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta (IIMC) set up the Tata Social Enterprise Challenge (TSEC) towards finding early stage social startups and creating an ecosystem for sustainable social ventures. Four years on and 700 entries later, TSEC is working at expanding the reach of the initiative. Prof Ashok Banerjee, Director, IIM Calcutta Innovation Park said, “We are in talks with local institutions where we will support them and they will take the initiative to work with local entrepreneurs. It’s a long term journey and we’ll add more partners as we go along.”

They are already in talks with IIT Guwahati to create a hub which would focus on the North-East states. TSEC already holds a series of seminars, lectures and roundtables across India to bring together social entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and academics. Atul Agrawal, Vice President – Corporate Affairs, Tata Services said, “The biggest problem with social startups is the lack of awareness. We started with telling them that they had to have a self-sustaining business model.” Over the last four years, the number of applications has gone up as have the quality of the proposals, from being at a bare bones idea stage to startups that have a beta version of their product or service in the market.

Ventures selected through this challenge then have the option of being incubated at the Innovation Park at IIMC. Ram Kumar, Founder and CEO of Edwell Solutions which provides multimedia based learning solutions and participated in TSEC said, “We got incubation support and mentorship on how our model can be scaled up; we realised we needed to restructure the business model and keep our focus on improving the learning outcomes of the students who go to government schools instead of a tuition centre model.”

Similarly, Bodhi Health Education, which trains health workers and is being incubated virtually managed to raise funds for expansion by tapping into the network TSEC provides. “Earlier we were only focused on the public sector but with guidance we diversified into the private and consumer markets and this is where we’ve seen a lot of our growth come from.”

The top teams have been mentored by Ashoka Innovators for the Public and Villgro, and Acumen, Ankur Capital, Ennovent and Yunus Social Business have come on board as VC partners for the TSEC.

Source: The Economic Times