What do Anil Kumar Taka, a Drishtee Kiosk Operator at the Jawahar Nagar village in the district of Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, India, and Stephen Holt, CEO of Movie Magic and an Iowa-based eBay entrepreneur, have in common?
Whether you call it the arrival of Business 2.0 or credit the technology revolution, it’s clear that cutting-edge companies the world over now provide platforms to empower their clients rather than delivering end-to-end solutions. eBay provides an automated and efficient platform for product distribution, leaving it to their enterprising customers to decide what product mix to sell and how to price it. Drishtee.com provides a turn-key package for offering residents of an Indian panchayat - a cluster of 5 villages - a mix of education, e-government, health, agriculture and leisure services delivered over a PC-based network.
While bricks and mortar franchises from Burger King to RE/MAXÂ have been a mainstay in developing countries for decades, and franchises account for a whopping 10% of US private sector GDP, this is a new twist that holds great promise both in the online sector and for developing-country social enterprises.Â
In the online sector, outfits like MySpace and Flickr are finding that, by providing simple but powerful tools and empowering customers to make decisions about content and use, they outsource the customization and marketing to the users themselves - so that they can focus their own efforts on strengthening the tools provided. The booming universe of such tools has led to the birth of the “minipreneur” movement: a new generation of individuals able to make a living - or at least a hobby - by leveraging free or low-cost online tools critical to delivering their product or service.
In the arena of social enterprise too, the minipreneur plays an increasingly important role. In Acumen Fund’s investment portfolio, Scojo Foundation, SHEF and Drishtee.com are three organizations that rely on enterprising individuals - Scojo’s Vision Entrepreneurs, SHEF’s Community Healthcare Workers (CHWs) and Drishtee’s Kiosk Operators - to leverage the platforms they provide. In serving low-income local markets, these companies, like the online leaders, find that it is challenging enough to build platforms for reliable, quality service delivery for critical health products. They therefore look to these enterprising people - who have a desire to help their communities and wish to make a livelihood out of doing it - to adapt the platform to the local context, provide sales and marketing to endusers, and provide feedback and guidance as to improvements needed to the overall programs. These are the real minipreneurs, who shoulder much of the burden of proving these innovative pro-poor business models. It is worth further examination to find out what makes the minientrepreneur tick, what determines their success, and ask what each can teach to, and learn from, their online counterparts.
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