svtgroup.net

Last weekend I was invited to Hyderabad, India, by the up-and-coming Indian School of Business to judge the Asia semi-finals of the Global Social Venture Competition. As the de facto (and hopefully one day full-fledged) fourth GSVC partner with London Business School, Columbia Business School and UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, ISB makes the competition truly global at last. We vetted teams from Thailand, Phillippines and several regions in India competed for the chance to attend the final round in New York in April. One last written screening in two weeks will pare the ten teams we selected down to three finalists.
This is my first-ever visit to India, though my seventh GSVC finals. Hyderabad was a lot like I had heard India would be, both in terms of the simultaneously gorgeous and sickening chaos, the traffic weaving through teeming, colorful humans of all ages, and the Sunnyvale, CA-like corporate campuses springing up like a mirage where the city once ended.
What was perhaps most striking of all was that the ventures we saw in this competition were so remarkably similar in their essential themes to many startups we have seen before in the GSVC:
Thailand: a breakthrough water purification technology to treat agricultural runoff
Philippines: organic fertilizer that simultaneously improves the environmental degradation caused by large-scale pig farming
India: Employment of the Marginalized

- a branding, distribution and technical assistance provider that helps local artisans find markets

- a food products company providing supported employment and reintegration for at-risk women who’d been trafficked as sex workers

- an IT company that employs bright, ambitious teenagers from the slums
It would be tremendous if these aspiring entrepreneurs, who are in many cases grappling with very similar missions and industries to those of competitors in years past, could link up with their predecessors and compare lessons learned. Maybe some would be competitors, but this is ultimately still a very big world and I think in almost all cases they would find that they are fighting on different fields for a common cause, and could reinforce one another. SVT is already building a social metrics database, and I discussed with a few of the GSVCers in Hyderabad how we might build this feature into it too. I look forward to developing that possibility.