Collaborative Project for Social Entrepreneurship

Objectives

• Common framework for students/universities to collaborate on projects
• Opportunity for peer review of projects
• Electronic format to capture data on communities and information on projects
• Means of identifying most promising ideas and potentially funding these ideas.

Brainstorming of Ideas

Entrepreneurs' basic functions include interactions with the environment, Opportunity Scanning and Identification. Social entrepreneurs are no diifrent. They also interact with the environment, and find opportunities to act, they are usualy innovative in their solutions.Innovation are not very difficult to make. Contrary to a gen. perception, innovation is not invention. It is (commercial) application of the idea. To initiate participants into active interactions with the environment and identification of opportunities, simple projects can be designed. For example, if some visitors to this page suggest a solution to any environmental problem in their locality, and a disscussion on the topics will certainly help everybody. In one of my visits in rural India, a small village hospital had a strange problem. People would consume chewing tobaco and spit in the corners. Many solutions were tried, including positioning spit toons at different places, making appeals, even administrative orders, but things did not change. A social entrepreneur thought of an innovative idea. He palced religious masseges, symbols etc. in all corners of the hospital. People in India have a great respect for all religions. The problem got solved by a simple actions. Do you have a similar story to tell? --Prof. Vivek Sharma 06:57, 10 January 2008 (UTC)