Pankaj Jain presenting at Villgro's Unconvention 2011. Source: http://www.unconvention.co.in
It’s Saturday just before lunch at Villgro’s Unconvention, held last month in Chennai , India. Pankaj Jain, Founder of Impact Law Ventures and Acumen Fund Alumnus, is running a ‘legal clinic’ focused on social enterprise, one of the many structured sessions that make up the 2 day discussions of failure, shared learnings and best practices, as well as peer and entrepreneur-investor networking. Unconvention 2011 takes place in the IIT Madras Research Park. Ravi Krishna, promoter and co-founder of Ziqitza Healthcare LTD (also known as Dial 1298 for Ambulance) is sharing Ziqitza’s corporate structure with the room. They have the for-profit company which purchases, manages and maintains the ambulance service, and a non-for-profit which trains the medical staff, doctors and technicians to work the ambulances. The room is silent, listening as he shares learnings of how the leadership at Ziqitza have structured their social enterprise which has grown from 10 ambulances to over 635 in four years, and now has government contracts to operate emergency services in four states across India.
As moderator, Pankaj takes engages the room with a slide that aims to ‘demystify the hybrid.’ Multiple people get up from their seats and take photos of this slide on their phones, smirks growing across their faces and mine. The truth is that despite this being a legal workshop on social enterprise, “hybrid structures” is not a legal term in India. According to the Indian government they don’t exist. So what are hybrids and why is the room so spell bound that it’s capturing seemingly illicit information on iPhones? Hybrid is the term given to enterprises that have established both for-profit and non-profit entities to better serve their customers. For example, Needlam Chibber’s Industree works with local artisans and retails their products across India. The non-profit arm trains the artisans, protecting their craft and worker’s rights, while the for-profit is the sales, distribution and marketing arm driving revenue growth for the company. This structure makes sense for many similar producer companies. The irony behind this deep fascination with hybrids is that there is an apparent black hole when it comes to getting information about how and why to structure your business this way. Jain reminds us that how the business works should be the determinate of what structure bests fits your company – not the other way around.
In an earlier panel that morning run by Pavarthi Menon of Innovation Alchemy, Mark Kahn of Godrej’s Omivore Ventures successfully facilitated an honest and constructive conversation on the importance of failure. With refreshing frankness, Mark admitted to some of his own entrepreneurial failures, explaining how he hoped they made him a better investment partner. He called investors to allow entrepreneurs to experiment more and talk openly about our own failures. “No one has figured this [impact investing] out, there are no home runs,” he challenged the audience; let’s admit what we don’t know and share what we do so we can re-set expectations and grow from a place of strength.
The packed ANDE India Chapter meeting provided an excellent forum for delegates from across the value chain to push forward a concrete discussion around how to best collaborate. This year, the dialogue around building an ecosystem has moved beyond asking whether a global organization has the right local infrastructure to support the growth of the sector here, to determining how various organizations are working to fill the ‘missing middle’ – the financing gap for small and medium enterprises— and the best practices and resources we can systematically share to best support each other. Villgro is spearheading efforts not only to build the ANDE India Chapter, but also through its long standing incubator program and social business plan competition. Unconvention is a solid slice of what can work when you leverage the strengths of all players in this wonderfully committed and diverse investing sector.
Molly Alexander is a Business Development Manager at Acumen Fund. She focuses on raising philanthropic capital for Acumen Fund, taking the lead on building a community of partners to support Acumen’s work in India.
Tags: ANDE, Dial 1298 for Ambulance, failure, Impact Law Ventures, India, Vilgro Unconvention