A few weeks ago, Vinay wrote about the growing business opportunities in the e-governance sector. An exciting recent development in this area has been the announcement by the Government of India of knowledge kiosks being set up in Panchayats. The project is sponsored by the E-governance in Panchayati Raj Institutions (e-PRIs) and is projected to [...]

Yesterday in my Leadership in Organizations class we discussed the concept of empowerment up and down the organizational chart — basically giving even the ‘lowest’ rungs on a corporate ladder the ability to make their own decisions and take control over their jobs. I could not help but think about my visit this January to [...]

Whether you are an individual investor, an institutional fund, or a microfinance organization, the issue of returns on social investment is always a concern.  The difference is usually in the approach that each stakeholder may take in measuring these returns.  The Grameen Foundation made a major stride in the effort to create an evaluation framework [...]

Social enterprises are often searching for sustainable breakthrough innovations, but lack the resources to invest in large-scale research and development.  One creative, and increasingly popular, solution to this problem is open innovation.  The basic concept is to utilize the collected knowledge of experts from around the world to solve design challenges. One such tool is [...]

[Story source: Businessworld] Businessworld is a well read business weekly in India. They are planning for a special issue on “India’s Hottest Young Entrepreneurs”.They are calling for entries from entrepreneurs/organizations to feature in this issue. Click here to read more about it. I do understand that this opportunity is not specific to social entrepreneurs. However, I [...]

TCI had mentioned the StartingBloc fellowship earlier, and this past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the Greater Boston institute at MIT Sloan and Tufts Fletcher School.  To provide some background on StartingBloc, the organization holds three institutes in Boston, New York and London, whose goal is to bring together a cadre of 150 young leaders with a passion for social innovation. [...]

The ThinkChange India team is proud to introduce Shivam as one of our new part-time bloggers. A quick introduction of Shivam: Shivam Srivastava is currently a WiMAX systems engineer at Motorola, Inc, where he designs and deploys wireless networks for rural parts of South and Central America. Shivam hopes to combine his passions of engineering [...]

The ThinkChange India staff is committed to providing our readers with interviews with people we believe are at the brink of something special but have for the most part been overlooked by the mainstream media. Readers will be able to see other conversations under our TC-I Changemakers tag. This week, Vinay sat down (over the phone) [...]

It’s that time of year again – Atlas Corps is seeking fellows for their 2009-2010 fellowship.  This is a great opportunity for nonprofit/NGO leaders from around the world (including India!) to learn from, experience, and exchange ideas with organizations in Washington, DC or Bogota, Colombia. Atlas Service Corps seeks nonprofit leaders from around the world [...]

I read Atanu Dey’s take on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in India in response to a question put forward by Sramana Mitra on her blog Why is the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India not coming together as well as it needs to? Atanu makes a strong pitch for leveraging existing solutions for development, reasoning that India has not [...]