Continuing its mission to encourage entrepreneurship in India, SAP and the Indian School of Business (ISB) have now collaborated on the ISB-SAP Social Enterprise Jumpstart program.
The program will identify five social enterprise startups and provide training, mentorship and access to networks to accelerate their growth. During the four months of the program, the startups will receive access to business, academic mentors and subject experts through the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) at ISB and SAP.
“Our objective is to create investible and growth-oriented social enterprises that would address unmet social needs and create significant employment opportunities,” said Dilipkumar Khandelwal, managing director, SAP Labs India and EVP, enterprise cloud service, SAP SE. “We will provide mentorship and connects to technology experts to speed up the growth of the social enterprises.”
It is also SAP’s aim to expand its thought leadership position to a wider segment of the entrepreneurship ecosystem.
On the new initiative, Rajendra Srivastava, ISB Dean and Novartis professor of marketing strategy and innovation said, “Entrepreneurship is core to ISB’s DNA and our focus on engendering a spirit of entrepreneurship among our students is showing success. We are now extending this spirit of enterprise beyond our students to help startups in the social enterprise space by leveraging our partnerships and the startup ecosystem at ISB.”
Early stage social entrepreneurs will be invited to apply for the program, with two people from each social enterprise chosen to undertake two residency modules at ISB and a boot camp. During the program, the social social enterprises will have the opportunity to present their business plans to venture capitalists and angel investors to raise funds.
SAP has recently announced startup incubation programs at IIT-Bombay, at the SAP Labs campus in Bangalore, and at the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship at IIM-Ahmedabad.
