ISB Hosts Asia Semi Final of the Global Social Venture Competition

The Indian school of Business (ISB) hosted the Asia Semi Final of the Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC). GSVC is a business plan competition that provides a forum for student entrepreneurs to showcase groundbreaking social ventures. The event was held at the ISB on January 28, 2006.

The Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC) exposes entrepreneurs, investors, managers and executives to the smartest new social ventures, and provides opportunities for corporate giving, community involvement and investment. The competition began in 1999, was organized by the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley, the Columbia Business School and The London Business School, and is supported by The Goldman Sachs Foundation. The Indian School of Business is the GSVC’s international affiliate and is responsible for promoting the competition in Asia and organizing the Asia Round of the competition. The ISB also organized guidance and support for teams entering the competition to fine tune their plans.

To promote the competition, the ISB sent out information about the competition to over 300 business and technology institutions across Asia. It also created a micro site for GSVC to provide necessary information to participants. These efforts resulted in 66 teams representing 27 business schools from 6 different Asian countries registering for the competition. The countries that participated in the competition were China, Thailand, Philippines, Australia, Hong Kong, and India; 40 teams submitted full business plans as their entries to the Asia Round of the competition. The plans submitted sought to exploit opportunities in a variety of areas such as agriculture, education, environment, health care and micro finance. The 40 plans went through a process of preliminary evaluation at the ISB by judging teams consisting of people with experience in the social sector. The judging teams short listed 16 of these plans for a presentation round at the ISB on January 28, 2006.

The presentation round of the GSVC Asia Semi Final was formally inaugurated by the Dean of the ISB Professor M Rammohan Rao on the evening of January, 27, 2006. To mark the occasion ISB also organized a Handicrafts Mela wherein local NGOs show cased products of ventures they were supporting.

An eminent panel of judges evaluated the 16 business plans short listed for the presentation round. The panel comprised Ms Sara Olsen (SVT Consulting), Ms Kim Alter (Virtue Ventures), Ms Alice Lin (IFC, Washington), Mr R S Sharat (DFID –UK), Ms Lakshmi Venkatesan (BYST), Mr Sarath Naru (APIDC Venture Capital and Venture East), Prof V Chandrasekar (ISB), and Prof K Ramachandran (ISB).