Summary

Social entrepreneurship is on the rise. Sixty percent of all social enterprises today were founded
only within the past eight years, according to Harvard Business Review. There are many
passionate, energetic people willing to roll up their sleeves to help rid the world of poverty,
hunger, joblessness, lack of water and proper sanitation, and other enormous problems.

The traditional approach to helping disadvantaged people is a top-down one, in which

government, NGOs, or businesses create solutions and provide them to the poor. Many large
corporations, for example, have convinced themselves that they can serve the poor by
producing and delivering goods and services at an affordable price— the bottom-of-the-
pyramid approach. Entrepreneurial outcomes may be guided by individual or collective access
to resources or the ability to convert resources into investment with or without keeping social
and ethical capital in mind. Grassroots innovators typically employ an enormous amount of
social and ethical capital, and their innovations often reinforce the renewability of natural
capital. But not all innovations or innovation based enterprises need to be sustainable or
pursue a larger social good. Knowledge, innovations and ideas from common people in the
informal or unorganized sector will become sine qua non of the innovation eco system of any
society.
For any social change, or even continuity, the emergence, sustenance and decline of different
institutions is very crucial. While some institutions must continue, others must die so that the
disadvantaged groups whom we characterize as knowledge rich, economically poor people can
get their due. A critical problem was that even the innovations, which existed, were often not
leveraged for wider social impact. Taking a grassroots approach to innovation is not easy.
Before embarking on this approach, one must first understand and reconceptualise the interface
between natural, social, ethical, and intellectual capital. Building upon grassroots innovations
as a fundamental building block for societal transformation is a valid and practical strategy.
Many countries have not yet resolved to scout, spawn, and sustain such innovations.
"We are reversing the model of globalisation. It is now emerging from India," says professor
Anil Gupta, faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and executive
vice-chairman of NIF. "This model is not about business to consumers, but grassroot to global
markets."