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What a great surprise it was when I discovered the world summit about social entrepreneurship was not only in India, but less than 100km in the north of Pondicherry !

Unltd India, a new organization based in Mumbai (see the post about them) had the rich idea to come here, in an artist village, to gather all social entrepreneurs from india (indeed, they were mainly from Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore) ! Under a tent, feet on the sand, with an incredible animation (stand up, shake 5 hands... !), we spent 2 great days, 100 social entrepreneurs together, with 30+ young fellows of Ashoka youth ventures !

Nachiket Mor, ICICI Foundation, made an "as usual" brillant introduction and made the most interesting description I found about entrepreneurship in general and social entrepreneurship in particular !

 As many entrepreneurs, his background start very early, when he was raised in a small village, close to poverty. He tried to act directly through NGO but didn't feel efficient in this form of action and decided to learn a job, develop skills, in ICICI bank.

After 20 years, he finally created ICICI foundation, trying to avoid powerful bureaucraty. His main role is so to identity and support partners organization. At this time, he mostly live in Tanjore, close to the IFMR Trust experimentation of "one-stop" guichet for financial services in rural areas (see my post on this subject). He works very closely with them and didn't build a large organization for that.

But the main interest of his presentation relies on the definition of reality and project. To sum up, an entrepreneur has to consider reality as he would like the reality should be ! A sort of screen or filter that allow him to have a vision of the future. Then, he can catch some elements of reality as it is (if ever one can think a reality can exist !) and adapt them to his vision ! That's exactly that, he pointed out what I love about entrepreneurs. They don't accept that a reality is there and lead you to make choices. They make the choices cause they really think a single guy in a remote village in India can change the world. That's beautiful and courageous !!

Lastly, he gave his own understanding of why social entrepreneurship is necessary. Nowadays, maximisation of profit is in general not enough to motivate clients, workers, shareholders... You have to tell a story (have you read "storyteller" ? you will understand that if you do : modern enterprises don't sell product, modern politicians don't sell ideas ; they all sell "stories" you buy !). And the bigger you grow, the further you get from the ground. So, you have to keep in touch, and find stories through social or environmental issues.