Innovation Alchemy

We are completing a year in June - and very excited about the last 12 months and the roller coaster ride it has been. I guess a year is too short for any kind of 'analysis' in an entrepreneurial journey - but am so glad we started. A big thank you to everyone who encouraged, contributed, nudged us in the right directions...

Glad to say that we prototyped several different business models in collaborating and consulting in the Innovation space, especially with social enterprises. It's a fast growing, evolving space and there is tons of learning to do. Prototypes continue and this year a few clear and replicable models will emerge...

My personal blog is now integrated into the Blog at the Innovation Alchemy Website. Visit the website for updates on our recent projects and new learning as we explore, apply and research Innovation Impact.

Or interact with me on Twitter (@parvathimenon) for updates as they happen.

Looking forward to an interactive, engaging, challenging year ahead...

Education...on a full stomach and nutritious meal!

Had an opportunity to explore and briefly immerse in the work of Akshaya Patra - a programme that provides food to over 1 million children in India. Now feeding 11,98,206 children everyday!

Millions of children in India don't get enough food for them to have any motivation or energy to really attend school or 'engage with learning'. Different studies put the number of children missing school because of lack of adequate food ranging from 7 million to 40 million across India.

Akshaya Patra focuses on this group of children. Through a range of public private partnerships, several schools now benefit from a very organized, nutritious mid-day meal.

What differentiates the Akshaya Patra effort from several other 'feeding children' initiatives is really how they have dealt with the size of the problem. By designing and engineering highly replicable, standardized processes. Spread across 8 states in India, accessible through centralized and decentralized kitchens, this non-profit organization is looking to reach 5 million children by 2020.

This mission is powered by some very large scale planning. A quick look at some numbers and the size of the operations, just in one kitchen!




The Kitchen on the Kanakpura road, Bangalore:

• Designed on the simple principles of gravity - this kitchen is a highly effective, eco-friendly operation that uses renewable fuel (husk based fuel) and recycles a large part of its waste
• Feeds around 100,000 children everyday. Plus Old people, expecting mothers and the local jail
  
• The kitchen cooks approx 6000 kgs of rice and 12,000-20,000 litres of sambhar/ dal (lentils) everyday
• Procures 5000 kgs of vegetables and 8000 litres of yogurt everyday
• Stores approximately 270 tonnes of rice for a month provided by the FCI for the mid day meal...apart from that procures rice for the BBMP scheme to feed old people in the communities
• Around 250 members work within this kitchen in 2-3 shifts starting at 3 am and going on till 6.30-7.00 pm
• People from local communities are employed in the kitchens - generating employment and building training and skills in cooking, hygiene, production, distribution..
  
• Over 3000 employed across all kitchens in India
  

Getting a hot nutritious meal to over a million children everyday is no mean feat! A brilliant example of achieving 'Scale' in social impact - comparable to any factory model for food production and distribution, Akshaya Patra has taken the job of cooking and distributing food to disadvantaged communities to another level of seriousness. Its engagement with the government at a regional level and ability to manage a diverse set of stakeholders in ensuring that healthy food reaches children and the needy is another aspect of its incredibly quiet but effective style of working.

Next level of innovation sensitive areas - community engagement, several million more children, scale out and scale up - get more education and nutrition based organizations to adopt the principles that are working here, building significantly enhanced nutrition in simple meals...so much more..

Dream-a-Dream

Friday afternoon 4.30 pm. Children from Ananya Shikshana Kendra and Makkala Jagriti are getting together at the SPT Sports Academy, Bangalore to play a friendly football match. Dream-a-Dream, a Bangalore based Civil Society Organization, facilitates the match for the children as a part of their sports program to build Life Skills in underprivileged children.

The kids from Makkala Jagriti are a little late - the Dream-a-Dream bus has picked them up from their school and tackled heavy Bangalore city traffic to bring them over to the Sports Academy. But when they arrive there is a flurry of reunion - kids meeting each other, colour jerseys and football studs being worn, boys and girls ready for the match - everyone excited to be outdoors, playing. The youngest child is around 6 years old all the way to senior kids from grades 8, 9 and above. The children are separated by height and age - and smaller teams are created. Each group then goes into a separate part of the field to warm up under the guidance of the team of coaches.

Ajit Gupta - the head Coach of the SPT Football programme tells me he is really excited to be doing these sessions. His team also runs 'regular' sessions each weekend where eager parents from in and around Bangalore bring their children in for Football Coaching. But Coach Ajit says working with the kids from Dream-a-Dream is energizing. The children are eager, very ready to be coached and wanting to learn and use every minute of the time they have on the field.

The senior children are formed into two teams and the rules are laid down for the match - boys and girls form part of each team. The coach tells me that the number of girls has been steadily increasing. The game gets under way - and gets into a heated mode real soon. By half time one side is clearly ahead - the other team is dejected. The coach huddles the team - and teaches them to deal with the frustration of loosing and convert it into strategy for the next half.

This is truly a life skills session. None of this can be taught in the regular academic classes. And without the support from Dream-a-Dream, the children from Ananya and Makkala Jagriti would not really have a chance to learn these critical skills of life survival - through such a fun and engaged excercise.



These life skills have the capacity of being a great leveler between regular and 'underprivileged' children. Vishal Talreja, the young CEO of the organization passionately believes in that possibility. At the end its about how well you can deal with issues, problems, situations in life - and the programmes run by his team focus on helping build that capacity through co-curricular activities.

Covering a key area of skill building their work focuses on the critical portion of the gap between an underprivileged child and his/ her ability to work with equal opportunities.




Working across several partners in Bangalore who work with underprivileged children, D-a-D is now looking to scale up their work and are struggling to determine if the scale that they want to achieve should be in terms of deeper impact or more numbers covered - or both? Given that this is a critical need area. That triggered the discussion and work with Innovation Alchemy.





They have built an amazing network of volunteers who come together to support the various activities and programmes. A small core team manages the operations and works through partner organizations and volunteers to reach over 2000 children in Bangalore. That's not a small number considering each child is in atleast one activity each week of the academic year.

As the Dream-a-Dream core Team came together last month for a 'scale-architecture' session, clearly the idea they have experimented with and fine tuned incredibly over the last 7-8 years is powerful, the operations are effective - and now its time to potentially reach 500,000 children in the next 5 years! Through a whole new service model leveraging Learning Skills Experts. The thought of being able to do that has energized the team! With a powerful fund raising base, D-a-D hopes to increase its reach and impact significantly - and also go beyond Bangalore and Mysore soon...

You can support their work by running in the Mumbai Marathon coming January. Infact you will find Dream-a-Dream at some of the biggest marathons across India, being supported by a bevy of volunteers who enjoy raising funds and giving time to this project...

Innovation Alchemy...scaling-up social enterprises

Growth is a tricky issue when is comes to the subject of creating Social Impact. In my transition from a largely corporate environment into the development sector - the definition of 'growth' and 'scale-up' stood out as a key point of difference that needed consideration...which led to the setting up of Innovation Alchemy, a firm focused on enabling growth agendas in the social impact space.

Of course, creating change and social impact is complex. People are dealing with the real challenges of poor economy, endangered ecology, lack of opportunity and lack of skills to use those opportunities and make real change possible.

In such complex scenarios, when you talk about 'growing an idea' or 'scaling an initiative' what do you focus on? How do you combine the passion needed to work hard and long in these areas - with the sharp business principles that need to be adopted for real scale.

A PRIA - John Hopkins University study in 2001 indicated that there were around 1.2 million NGOs in India - that number could well be 3 million now. Those are huge numbers by any standard - and in a largely fragmented sector, without an institutional framework to grow within.

What it essentially means is that there are hundreds of ideas out there and lots of passion, being implemented in small scale to try and impact local communities, local issues. Several of these organizations have demonstrated impact at a micro level, are great ideas - and now really need to scale-up and grow for real change to be visible. NGO's have started to transition into Social Enterprise organizations, and the issue of scaling up is becoming a loud conversation.

As a start point for the discussions is to define the intent for scaling up... what is the focus?

1. Increasing the number of 'people'/ 'communities' impacted by the initiatives? For example SKS Microfinance in India now reaches around 3 million individual customers - poor women - who have benefited from micro-enterprise loans..

2. Or Deepening the impact on the people and communities - so increasing the nature and complexity of projects and the 'comprehensiveness' of the impact. BRAC in Bangladesh has evolved since 1972 to be a huge platform of support initiatives that has the capacity to customize and provide solutions to the poor, in a very localized manner. A poor woman in the village can rely on BRAC to provide her with essential health care, education for herself and her family, business support, legal assisstance and a voice in local issues.

3. Or doing a combination of both in an attempt to stay small - but have larger impact - collaborating with a lot of partners in a sort of R&D based, franchise model for growth where others take up the idea and build it in their regions...while the core team works on a small 'lab' or core zone of impact to create newer solutions..

At Innovation Alchemy we look at these challenges up close and work with the evolving Social Enterprise Teams in their quest for growth. We apply a very collaborative, hands-on approach in our work - thus getting involved over 12-18 months in working with each team to help them design and develop scale for their organizations.