Aug 27 2014 : The Economic Times (Bangalore)
If You're Thinking Social Innovation, Think Hubli
Pankaj Mishra1
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Hubli:
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Gururaj Deshpande's sandbox model identifies and incubates ideas and help them scale up
Last Saturday Phanindra Sama, the founder of bus-ticketing portal Redbus, was engrossed in a huddle discussing the challenges of developing services for those living in villages.He had made a small fortune developing a service for the tech-savvy and had come to Hubli in northwestern Karnataka to understand how to spend some of that fortune on stimulating entrepreneurship where it is needed the most.
“I'll not attempt building roads or tanks like the government does.What I can do as an entrepreneur is help people experiment and scale ideas that matter,“ said Sama, who had made a 400-km journey to the Deshpande Foundation, the social innovation hub of India, from Bangalore, the country's technology hub.
Emulating the work of Gururaj `Desh' Deshpande, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who once was India's richest man, Sama is looking to replicate the `Hubli Sandbox' in his hometown Nizamabad in Telangana. Sama, 33, has teamed up with Raju Reddy , the founder of IT services company Sierra Atlantic, to sponsor the `Kakatiya Sandbox'. Kakatiya Sandbox is named after the progressive dynasty that ruled presentday Telangana between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. In Hubli with Sama and Deshpande that day was Lalitesh Katragadda, the former Google India head of products and the brain behind Google Maps. He had joined a group that was discussing how technology could play a role in solving the problems of ordinary folk in the Hubli region. “A day spent here with the users is equal to a year of research,“ said Katragadda after field trips across Hubli to understand hardships of people in remote villages. At the centre of all this is Deshpande who, over the years, has built the `sandbox' as a space for free thinking, experimentation and innovation to find solutions to real-world problems. “Great ideas don't need to be patentable or the first in the world; they don't make any impact unless directed to a burning problem,“ said Deshpande, the founder of several Silicon Valley communication technology companies and a venture capitalist.
Over the years, Deshpande -he is related by marriage to Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy and an adviser on innovation and entrepreneurship to US President Barack Obama has created a model that identifies and incubates ideas and helps them scale. One example of an idea that scaled thanks to Deshpande's sandbox model is Akshaya Patra, the midday meal scheme that feeds millions of school children everyday. He has been able to attract the finest talents and get them to pool their intellectual resources to incubate entrepreneurial ideas in the social sector. So that is why researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology travel halfway round the world to take up his challenge. And that is also why former minister Jairam Ramesh was attracted to Hubli. “This is entrepreneurship of a different variety. It is about creating pull, not push,“ said Ramesh.
So, where are the next Akshaya Patras? “There are 50 ideas that we now have, all in the process of scaling up. At least three of them could be the next ones,“ said Deshpande, who is in his sixties. For the `Kakatiya Sandbox,' Sama and his team have picked Srikanth Bolla as the first entrepreneur who will receive their help. Bolla, who is visually challenged and received a fellowship from MIT's Public Service Center in 2011, has built a training centre and digital library for the blind. “The Hubli model has been perfected through investments over many years: we could fund it to eternity here,“ said Sama, who sold his company to Ibibo group for about `. 600 crore.
In 2007, when Deshpande started the sandbox along with his wife Jaishree (she is the sister of Sudha Murty, the woman who provided seed capital for Infosys), Hubli offered more problems than he had imagined. But the biggest challenge was that several NGOs and self-help groups were chasing problems with their own versions of solutions.“Great ideas don't need to be patentable or the first in the world; they don't make any impact unless directed to a burning problem,“ he said. Since then, he's been investing about ` . 20 crore annually to fund focussed groups of NGOs, entrepreneurs and students to help create an ecosystem where new ideas could be tried without any fear of failure. It's almost like attempting to build a Silicon Valley for social innovation.
From a brake system for bullock carts that ensures that the animals don't get hurt while stopping to software-enabled machines that help producers automate the entire process of sorting cashewnuts according to their quality, the ideas have been getting incubated at a brisk pace. “We do see failure rates of 80%, but that's natural,“ said Naveen Jha, the CEO of Deshpande Foundation. Like Silicon Valley, Deshpande's sandbox has attracted some influential sponsors such as Ratan Tata. One of the projects adopted by Tata is Manuvikasa an initiative to build farm ponds for farmers, helping them to avoid installing water pumpsets that consume electricity. By storing rain water, the farmers are now also able to grow multiple crops in a year, save extra water for cattle and household needs, and improve groundwater levels. Another entrepreneur, Sasisekar Krish, a computer chip designer who worked at Wipro for eight years before starting up, found an interesting problem to solve. Many cashewnut producers in the Hubli region were facing a shortage of workers who could grade different varieties of the nuts according to their quality. Krish developed a machine with an embedded software application that helps do the job.So far, he has sold around 40 machines and hopes to earn nearly ` . 10 crore in revenue this year. For Deshpande, entrepreneurship is a subtle yet clear idea. “When somebody else gives you a problem to solve, it's homework. But if you pick a problem yourself to solve, it's an entrepreneurial opportunity.“
“I'll not attempt building roads or tanks like the government does.What I can do as an entrepreneur is help people experiment and scale ideas that matter,“ said Sama, who had made a 400-km journey to the Deshpande Foundation, the social innovation hub of India, from Bangalore, the country's technology hub.
Emulating the work of Gururaj `Desh' Deshpande, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who once was India's richest man, Sama is looking to replicate the `Hubli Sandbox' in his hometown Nizamabad in Telangana. Sama, 33, has teamed up with Raju Reddy , the founder of IT services company Sierra Atlantic, to sponsor the `Kakatiya Sandbox'. Kakatiya Sandbox is named after the progressive dynasty that ruled presentday Telangana between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. In Hubli with Sama and Deshpande that day was Lalitesh Katragadda, the former Google India head of products and the brain behind Google Maps. He had joined a group that was discussing how technology could play a role in solving the problems of ordinary folk in the Hubli region. “A day spent here with the users is equal to a year of research,“ said Katragadda after field trips across Hubli to understand hardships of people in remote villages. At the centre of all this is Deshpande who, over the years, has built the `sandbox' as a space for free thinking, experimentation and innovation to find solutions to real-world problems. “Great ideas don't need to be patentable or the first in the world; they don't make any impact unless directed to a burning problem,“ said Deshpande, the founder of several Silicon Valley communication technology companies and a venture capitalist.
Over the years, Deshpande -he is related by marriage to Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy and an adviser on innovation and entrepreneurship to US President Barack Obama has created a model that identifies and incubates ideas and helps them scale. One example of an idea that scaled thanks to Deshpande's sandbox model is Akshaya Patra, the midday meal scheme that feeds millions of school children everyday. He has been able to attract the finest talents and get them to pool their intellectual resources to incubate entrepreneurial ideas in the social sector. So that is why researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology travel halfway round the world to take up his challenge. And that is also why former minister Jairam Ramesh was attracted to Hubli. “This is entrepreneurship of a different variety. It is about creating pull, not push,“ said Ramesh.
So, where are the next Akshaya Patras? “There are 50 ideas that we now have, all in the process of scaling up. At least three of them could be the next ones,“ said Deshpande, who is in his sixties. For the `Kakatiya Sandbox,' Sama and his team have picked Srikanth Bolla as the first entrepreneur who will receive their help. Bolla, who is visually challenged and received a fellowship from MIT's Public Service Center in 2011, has built a training centre and digital library for the blind. “The Hubli model has been perfected through investments over many years: we could fund it to eternity here,“ said Sama, who sold his company to Ibibo group for about `. 600 crore.
In 2007, when Deshpande started the sandbox along with his wife Jaishree (she is the sister of Sudha Murty, the woman who provided seed capital for Infosys), Hubli offered more problems than he had imagined. But the biggest challenge was that several NGOs and self-help groups were chasing problems with their own versions of solutions.“Great ideas don't need to be patentable or the first in the world; they don't make any impact unless directed to a burning problem,“ he said. Since then, he's been investing about ` . 20 crore annually to fund focussed groups of NGOs, entrepreneurs and students to help create an ecosystem where new ideas could be tried without any fear of failure. It's almost like attempting to build a Silicon Valley for social innovation.
From a brake system for bullock carts that ensures that the animals don't get hurt while stopping to software-enabled machines that help producers automate the entire process of sorting cashewnuts according to their quality, the ideas have been getting incubated at a brisk pace. “We do see failure rates of 80%, but that's natural,“ said Naveen Jha, the CEO of Deshpande Foundation. Like Silicon Valley, Deshpande's sandbox has attracted some influential sponsors such as Ratan Tata. One of the projects adopted by Tata is Manuvikasa an initiative to build farm ponds for farmers, helping them to avoid installing water pumpsets that consume electricity. By storing rain water, the farmers are now also able to grow multiple crops in a year, save extra water for cattle and household needs, and improve groundwater levels. Another entrepreneur, Sasisekar Krish, a computer chip designer who worked at Wipro for eight years before starting up, found an interesting problem to solve. Many cashewnut producers in the Hubli region were facing a shortage of workers who could grade different varieties of the nuts according to their quality. Krish developed a machine with an embedded software application that helps do the job.So far, he has sold around 40 machines and hopes to earn nearly ` . 10 crore in revenue this year. For Deshpande, entrepreneurship is a subtle yet clear idea. “When somebody else gives you a problem to solve, it's homework. But if you pick a problem yourself to solve, it's an entrepreneurial opportunity.“
