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Today, every aspiring auto entrepreneur and tech startup founder is “standing on the shoulders of giants.” That’s no coincidence. A robust knowledge infrastructure is designed to solve problems quickly and at scale. Fundamental principles are proven and studied in an academic environment. Innovators use these principles to create tools that can be used by a wide range of people. There are financial (revenue) and non-financial (recognition, as in the case of open source) incentives that encourage people to not only share but continue to invest in these tools. There are journals, forums, and marketplaces for discovery, discussion, and feedback, ensuring natural selection on merit. It is on top of this infrastructure that entrepreneurs aim to do more.
Social entrepreneurs who improve the quality of education in disadvantaged communities rarely have such infrastructure. She starts from scratch based on her own experience. She is coached on fundamentals, inspirational case studies, and networking opportunities. From time to time, she meets fellow entrepreneurs who become her partners. But she’s probably made the same mistakes and learned the same things as many people before her.
Initial efforts are being made to build the knowledge infrastructure for impact. Academic programs are emerging that focus on principles and practices for solving social problems. Platforms like DIKSHA help share and reuse resources for public education. ASER assessments are trusted to assess a child’s learning level. Initiatives such as the Life Skills Collaborative have created a reputation as a public good. However, these are simply inadequate for the scale and complexity of what we are working on. We need a paradigm shift in the way we solve social problems.I think three key levers are important for this.
Setting up a resource marketplace
If a public health entrepreneur needs a tool to assess the mental health of a community, where should they go? , advanced because it served as an infrastructure for merit-based evaluation. We need similar infrastructure to make an impact. Now, anyone looking to share resources with the ecosystem has a monumental responsibility to ensure adoption. We need a digital space to share innovation, a community built around that space to provide feedback, and a decentralized model to bloom a thousand flowers.
Restructuring of capital flows
Why should organizations continue to invest in and create resources for wider use by other organizations? All organizations are encouraged to make an ‘end-to-end’ impact . No organization has an incentive to reuse existing assets or build on the work of others. Funding needs to be restructured to encourage new behaviors. We need funding for public goods that measure rigor, adoption, and credibility as indicators of success. Funders supporting the program should also measure proven asset reuse so that implementing partners can focus on their core strengths as an organization. This automatically creates an organization that invests in building public goods that can be used by others.
change the story
What we celebrate is what we get. All funders want to know their direct impact on society. Entrepreneurs are celebrated for their direct impact on their communities. Despite all the talk about collaboration, our mental model is that of lone warriors solving complex and intractable problems on their own. Although heroic, this is a completely suboptimal structure for how we solve problems. Can we create a paradigm where instead of celebrating how far we’ve walked, we pave the way for the next person to go further than we have? We need to reflect this paradigm in our investments and implementation.
We are truly at a turning point. As India celebrates its 100th anniversary, we have the opportunity to ensure that all its citizens have the opportunity to live a fulfilling life. Rising domestic wealth and corporate responsibility means more people are becoming deeply involved in social impact for the first time in their lives. A deep sense of opportunity will encourage more entrepreneurs to solve social problems. Our cost-based, people-intensive, DIY approach is not a model that helps solve social problems. We need a system with the incentives, infrastructure, and zeitgeist to work together.
(Rathish Balakrishnan is co-founder and managing partner of Sattva Consulting. He has appeared in X @rathish_bala)
Disclaimer: These are the author’s personal opinions.
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