Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/337193
BY THANE KREINER S ocial entrepreneurship is the focus of our efforts at Santa Clara University's Center for Science, Technology, and Society (CSTS). It's that mission that inspired us to create our Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) program, through which we work with entrepreneurs on their home soil to help build sustainable, scalable enterprises that serve the world's poor. Since its inception in 2003, the GSBI has worked with more than 200 social enterprises that provide base-of-pyramid markets with essential goods and services. Products of GSBI enterprises have included "elephant pumps" that allow a village to manually pump clean water, high-efficiency "rocket stoves" for cooking, affordable prostheses, and ready-to-use thera- peutic food. Through GSBI, we have impacted the lives of nearly 100 million people in 55 countries. We aim to better the lives of one bil- lion of the world's poor by the year 2020. To reach our goal, however, we can't just incubate promising social enterprises; we have to incu- bate incubators. Plans with Potential We look for entrepreneurs at social enterprises that already have proven business models, strong local con- nections, and in-depth knowledge of local needs—they just need more business training and funding to flourish. We then draw on our access to Silicon Valley executives and a global network of more than 120 Jesuit universities to provide these entrepreneurs with individu- alized mentoring and a structured curriculum. Promising entrepreneurs come to our campus for an inten- sive two-week boot camp that we Incubating for Impact hold every August as part of the ten-month GSBI. They then con- tinue to connect with their mentors online once they return home. The GSBI program is delivered through the efforts of 12 CSTS staff—many of whom are entre- preneurs or venture capitalists—as well as an advisory board of 12 executives and six SCU faculty. We also work with approximately 70 mentors, all executives with extensive experience in Silicon Valley. GSBI is supported by orga- nizations such as the World Bank, Skoll Foundation, and the Acumen Fund, which help identify promis- ing enterprises and invite them to participate in our curriculum. About 25 percent of the GSBI's budget comes from the university— the rest, from the support of corpo- rate and individual donations. When we decided to scale the GSBI to other campuses and orga- nizations to amplify its impact, our original plan was to "incubate incubators" by replicating the GSBI at other Jesuit universities. But replication doesn't account for geo- graphical and cultural context. We have learned that we must tailor the program to the needs of the entre- preneurs and the capabilities of the nascent incubators. So far, we have worked with partner programs at the Escuela Superior de Administración y Dirección de Empresas (ESADE) in Spain; Villgro, an incubator in India; and Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. Recognizing Differences After Alfred Vernis, an associate professor at ESADE, came to Santa Clara two years ago to observe our boot camp, he immediately started thinking about how ESADE could implement the GSBI. After returning to ESADE, Vernis worked with students in his social entrepreneurship class to assess the program's potential in Spain, where the construction sector was on the brink of collapse and the unemploy- ment rate was rising fast. Vernis drafted a proposal that focused on creating jobs for the country's least- employable populations, including minority groups, battered women, and the disabled. Months later, ESADE's Momen- tum Project was born. Similar to the GSBI, the Momentum program works with social enterprises from outside the university system, selecting ten per year. It uses the same curriculum to train entrepre- neurs, and it pairs them with expe- rienced mentors. But the GSBI and Momentum differ in important ways. For instance, while Santa Clara's GSBI focuses a great deal on off-grid energy, Momentum is largely inter- ested in job creation. In addition, at the GSBI, we match participat- ing enterprises with our impact investment partners, such as Accion and Hub Ventures; ESADE, on the other hand, draws on its relationship with BBVA, the sec- ond largest bank in Spain. BBVA funds both the incubator and the social enterprises that go through it, offering low-interest loans via the Momentum Social Investment Fund. The bank has lent more than US$3.3 million dollars to date. Momentum also takes a dif- ferent approach to mentoring. Because the GSBI works with social enterprises overseas, its social entrepreneurs meet face-to-face with mentors during its on-campus boot camp. Because Momentum's social entrepreneurs and mentors live in the same country, they meet for four days a month over the course of three months. Of the mentors Momentum assigns to each enterprise, one July/August 2014 BizEd 32