Projects

Short Description:

Overall goal

The feasibility will assess the possibilities to organize an organizational evolution accelerator with the outcome innovations improve the organizational effectiveness of startups in low-income markets, for more efficiency and better implementation of business plans. The feasibility will assess the legal, economic, social and technical feasibility of such an endeavor.

Expected results

In each phase of the project, a number of startups and SMEs will benefit from innovations in their organizational structure, with 50 startups over five years (six in the pilot phase of the feasibility). The core emphasis of this project will be to ensure the most efficient use of resources in startups by improving organization systems. However, as these innovations are adapted, jobs will be created in the startups. On an average, the team size of each startup is expected to increase by 20 thus creating 1.000 jobs. The indirect beneficiaries of this project would include the end consumers of the innovations accelerated. The 50 startups are expected to benefit 1.248.000 people directly in the first three years of operations.

Target group / Beneficiaries

Startups are working to address India’s development needs through business innovations. However, the innovation ecosystems that these enterprises operate in are dynamic by nature and constantly evolving. The speed of this change (e.g. through digitalization) and the complexity in today’s markets has increased radically. At each stage of this evolutionary development, the processes, structural and cultural attributes underpinning organizational systems must be adapted to changing surroundings for an organization to remain successful. Startups that fail to evolve their systems experience challenges across a range of dimensions including operating efficiency, employee motivation, communication, planning and role definition. In the last decade, developed markets have witnessed a gradual shift away from traditional organizational structures, which have typically emphasized hierarchies, chain of command, control, and carrot-and-stick approaches. New paradigms, which encourage empowerment and self-organizing for an evolutionary purpose, are paving the way forward for increased agility, efficiency, transparency, innovation, accountability and personal well-being.

Activities

The partnership aims to leverage train consulting’s knowledge of organizational systems and Ennovent’s experience in accelerating innovations in low-income markets. The benefit of this expertise will help the selected startups bridge gaps in their organizational systems. The project’s key components are:

1. Discover: Focus on identifying organizational system innovations globally, as well as startups to pilot test the innovations. Crowdsourcing and Pyramiding methodologies will be employed to ensure high quality and diversity of innovations and startups.

2. Finance: Through the finance component, the accelerator will provide financial assistance to the shortlisted startups. This funding will be utilized specifically for the purpose of testing out organization system innovations that were selected for piloting.

3. Startup: The accelerator will aim to design, implement and monitor lean pilots to test the selected innovations through startups. Each innovation will be adapted to the corresponding startup and an emphasis will be made on putting in place monitoring systems to assess the effectiveness of the innovations being tested.

4. Scale: Growth and impact of the accelerated innovations will be increased. The accelerator will support the startups for a year after the launch of the new organizational systems to make sure the systems are further adapted.

Context

The project was submitted in the framework of the Social Entrepreneurship Challenge 2015.