SAP and ISB join hands together to boost social entrepreneurship
SAP and the Indian School of Business (ISB) recently collaborated with each other to augment the social entrepreneurship ecosystem with relevance to national priorities. The ISB-SAP initiative, namely ‘Social Enterprise Jumpstart’, will identify five social enterprise startups and provide training, mentorship and access to networks to accelerate their growth.
SAP’s collaboration with ISB is in tune with its strategy to drive social entrepreneurship through an alliance with leading Indian academic institutions. With this initiative, SAP will expand its thought leadership to a much wider segment in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. SAP will bring in expertise to go to market, technology trends, customer acquisitions, design thinking methodology among others for social enterprises under this programme. The best part is the facility is not constrained to the students of the ISB only, others working in the social entrepreneurship space can also get the benefit from the initiative.
The four-month fixed-term mentor-driven programme will provide identified startups access to business, academic mentors and subject experts through the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) at ISB and SAP. Startups will be identified through a nationwide selection process with the involvement of the SAP, ISB and other relevant experts from the startup ecosystem.
“Our objective is to create investible and growth-oriented social enterprises that would address unmet social needs and create significant employment opportunities” stated Dilipkumar Khandelwal, Managing Director, SAP Labs India and EVP, Enterprise Cloud Services, SAP SE. “We will provide mentorship and connects to technology experts to speed up the growth of the social enterprises,” he further added.
Commenting on the new initiative Rajendra Srivastava, ISB Dean and Novartis Professor of Marketing Strategy and Innovation said, “Entrepreneurship is core to ISB’s DNA and our focus on engendering a spirit of entrepreneurship among our students is showing success. We are now extending this spirit of the enterprise beyond our students to help startups in the social enterprise space by leveraging our partnerships and the startup ecosystem at ISB.”
The five early-stage social entrepreneurs identified under the ISB-SAP Social Enterprise Jumpstart will be admitted to and supported as one cohort and will be part of the entrepreneur and innovation ecosystem to receive mentorship, training and networking opportunities with academia and industry.
Deserving stage social entrepreneurs will be invited to apply and put through a selection process that will include experts from ISB, SAP and the startup ecosystem. Two persons from each social enterprise will be selected to undergo the programme which will have two residency modules at ISB and one boot camp at SAP. These social enterprises will get an opportunity to present their business plans to venture capitalists and angel investors to raise funds.
Earlier in June 2016, SAP had established an Innovation Centre and Startup Accelerator Program in IIT Bombay.