Creation of an Ecosystem

My mentor during my stay at Stanford is currently visiting Motorola India Research Labs in Bangalore on a temporary posting. He used this opportunity to invite me to make a presentation on our Disease Surveillance project to a group of senior people at Motorola India Research Labs this morning. It was a highly interactive session in which about 15 researchers took part and asked some very interesting questions on my project. Rajiv's objective was to get the local Motorola team interested in supporting our project in some collaborative way. A one-hour session went on for over 2 hours and was then followed by lunch. So I think it was great exposure
for our project. I also got to meet a set of very smart, young people who are excited about the potential applications of mobile technologies to social problems.

Thanks, Rajiv, for arranging this talk. Let us keep networking and propound our ideas in every possible situation. That is how we can create an ecosystem for social entrepreneurship in India.

Shashank

Social Entrepreneur or Activist Entrepreneur?

Back in Bangalore, I was recently discussing our stint at Stanford's Digital Vision Program with a few friends when a few good ideas came up. I was giving my usual spiel on Social Entrepreneurship when my good friend Partho Ray chirped up and said that instead of "Social Entrepreneur" we should perhaps consider the term "Activist Entrepreneur".

His reasoning was that while the word "entrepreneur" captured the concept of a passionate individual or group focusing on doing something positive very well, the word "social" has negative connotations as it tends to represent the average NGO and/or politico who is typically a stumbling block to progress. He felt that the concept of "social entrepreneur" is an oxymoron. The "socialist" is typically some guy out to bring the least common denominator to society, he is out to promote poverty as a virtue and to bring everyone down to a lower common level of wealth. On the other hand, an "activist" is a person out to disrupt the status quo, to bring about positive societal change and raise the level of the least common denominator itself.

Sounds familiar? A socialist society encourages shared community resources and distribution of wealth, even though unearned, and discourages private ownership. Distribution of poverty and collateral misery is the goal of a socialist, tghough he may not think so. On the other hand, a capitalist society encourages creation of individual wealth through personal initiative and ownership. How do you distribute wealth without first creating it? Sounds reasonable?

In a sense, "social" and "entrepreneur" do not mix very well and "social entrepreneur" may be an oxymoron. However, an activist sounds like a positive person who has his heart in the right place.

Now that's an interesting idea worthy of a fresh debate. Social Entrepreneur or Activist Entrepreneur? Does anyone want to take this theme forward?

Shashank

Trip to a Museum and Building Robust Futures through Scenarios

Amongst the many awesome resources at Stanford is the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts located close to the Quad. A truly remarkable museum that we visited on our penultimate day at Stanford, we found it to be a hidden gem well worth a visit even though we could spend just a few hours there. I do wish every visitor to the Stanford campus would find some time to visit this place and spend some time there.

It started as the Leland Stanford Jr. Museum way back in 1894, around the same time as the formation of the university itself, but in 1999 it re-opened after extensive modifications as the Cantor Center for Visual Arts.

The Rodin collection and the Rodin Sculpture Garden are truly remarkable. We also saw an exhibition of artifacts depicting the life of the Tuareg, a nomadic tribe of North-western Africa. The good news is that Cantor Museum allow visitors to take pictures, except in their Photo Gallery. So, thanks to the versatility, portability and unobtrusiveness of the digital camera, we landed up taking a lot of pictures.

However, we had a major disaster that I should have been better prepared for. While we managed to take loads of pictures inside the Museum, our camera battery died on us when we came out into the Rodin Garden. I was reminded of the usefulness of Neil Jacobstein's Robust Futures and Scenarios Workshop in which he taught us to think of the worst-case and best-case scenarios that our projects might encounter and then prepare strategies for handling them and build robust organisations. A pity, I hadn't thought of carrying a spare camera battery while visiting a museum. I had a spare high capacity memory card and was confident I would have adequate storage capacity for the entire day but forgot a basic fact that modern mobile devices have finite battery life!!

So Neil's workshop on planning for robust futures and a visit to the Cantor Museum brought home to me the importance of scenario planning for any major activity that we wish to undertake. While intuition is good, it can always be improved through formal structure and scenario planning. Thanks Neil, for the wonderful workshop that I will always remember and for exposing us to a different way of thinking about the future.

Shashank