Otherwise expensive consultancy services come free to social sector.
It works to the benefit of both social-sector entrepreneurship as well as students of business. Students at the Indian School of Business (ISB) have been working on projects with firms in the social sector, free of cost, for a period of about three months.
ISB students engaged in this social initiative are members of Net Impact Chapter, an international network of over 15,000 graduate students, including also students of leading US universities like Harvard, Stanford and Carnegie Melon. ISB is the only Indian B-school to have a Net Impact Chapter since 2003.
ISB students were involved in about 20 projects in the social sector in 2009. To bring in the global perspective, international students from around 10 business schools in Australia, the US, Spain and Italy were also roped in. “We informed student bodies at different business schools of the nature of projects available, and invited applications. We got 35 applicants; we had only 20 projects this year,” says Nishant Banore, president, Net Impact Club and a postgraduate student at ISB.
On getting project requests from social sector players, interested students formed teams and contacted firms. “The earlier focus was on charity, but we wanted to see how to use the core competencies of students to work on problems in social sector organisations,” Banore said.
Their work earned the ISB chapter the Best International Graduate Student Chapter of the Year award at the annual Net Impact Conference, held at Cornell University, New York. BHUMI-Centre for Transformational Leadership and Naandi Foundation were among the NGOs that benefited from the work of the students.
“Most NGOs can’t afford to hire professional consulting firms. These projects helped the students by offering them a whole different range of experience and perspective,” said Mouneesh Sinha, a postgraduate student and co-ordinator, ISB Global Pro-Bono Consulting.
Describing a project, Banore said, “India’s pepper production is only a tenth of US or German production, per acre. The international student’s perspective helped increase yield, with a minor adjustment in shade management, twice a year.”
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