SESSION ON SOCIAL VENTURES AND GLOBAL OPPORTUNITIES

A session on Social Ventures and Global Opportunities was conducted by BIMTECH, Noida on 21st October 2016. Students Ms. Vertika(18181), Ms. Shweta (18164) and Mr. Yatin Khatter(18187) of Computer Science and Engineering Department from Dronacharya College of Engineering, Gurgaon attended the session.

The distinguished guest, Ms. Belinda Bell from Judge Business School, Cambridge University, UK discussed Social Ventures and Global Opportunities. Belinda Bell runs Cambridge Social Ventures, a specialist programme supporting ambitious social ventures to scale. Belinda is a social entrepreneur with experience in establishing, supporting and growing organizations that bridge the public, private and third sectors; alongside extensive experience in consultancy and within academia.

She explained social enterprise is the one that works for social welfare. She also discussed the problems faced in this regard which include generation shift, fear, visibility of global issues, wicked problems that are complex problem. Participants also came to know about features of social ventures, motivational factors. She also shared with students the values that are needed to make social enterprises successful and which are:

1. Aim to create sustainable social and economic value

2. Socially impactful

3. Values, mission and government alignments

The idea for any new startup has some story behind it which drives the person to become entrepreneur and start the venture. It can be an internal or external factor. The internal factors could be personal experience from any incidence or frustration of anything that might have affected the person in one way or the other. The external factors could be Money, hunger for Status and Reputation. She also said that there are actually three ways to create any social change which could be Social Entrepreneurship, Social Intrapreneurship or Social Innovation.

At the end of the session the students were introduced to the challenges faced by social entrepreneurs like operating in places of market failure, creating a completely new market, have partially complex partnerships, creating unusual legal vehicles, seeking to ethically gold plate service or products and many others. The students also learnt about the key issues to social enterprises like Business model innovation, demonstration impact and sealing up the deals.

The overall session was very educative and informative for the students and opened up new visions for them. The students got to know what social enterprise is and how it is different from other enterprises.

Glimpses of the events: