This post covers the story of the inception of this newsletter, the aim and objective of starting this writing this, along with some overview of the gaps that this newsletter aims to address, and the way forward.
The Enterprise Labs started in early 2014 as an outcome of the long-standing nightly conversations in the dorm room of my alma mater, the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India. The crowd that gathered in the room engaged in boisterous and captivating conversations on creating new businesses, exploring new ideas and opportunities that can be taken up as viable enterprise initiatives. Each night, a new topic was chosen, and a business plan was drawn - complete with technical, market, financial, and management perspectives. Back then, I was new to the whole domain of business and entrepreneurship, and frankly out of my comfort zone of technology, innovation, and social impact. However, these conversations had a lasting impact on me, and has carried on through the years.
The conversations in that room built the foundation for some of us to embark upon a journey to explore an emerging component of the entrepreneurship ecosystem called incubators, and introducing these incubators down to the domains of rural entrepreneurship and the microentrepreneurship space. Our pitch was something as follows:
Due to the sudden health emergency in the family, Suresh bhai had to go back to his village, leaving his job as a canteen manager at the campus. He thinks of starting his own kirana store in his village to meet up with the expenses and earn a livelihood, with a meagre Rs 50,000 capital which is raised from friends, family, savings, and moneylenders. Which IIT or an IIM or other private incubation support organisation should Suresh bhai go to access incubation services to get help setting up his business?
Not much has changed since. Although we failed miserably, we learnt valuable lessons in approaching the space of value creation for enterprise development, especially in the rural and micro-enterprise context.
This evolved with time, with my interest in learning even more about how startups and enterprises scale up. I did get to explore this over the past couple of years. A couple of months into the COVID-19 pandemic when I took a plunge moving out of the consulting space, I decided to work on this as a side project. Over a period of the past couple of months, I did manage to revive the old conversations and restart this initiative. A culmination of debates and discussions with my former colleagues and classmates led to the inception of this newsletter.
The objective of this newsletter is to become a collaborative space discussing topics at the intersection of social impact, innovation, strategy, sustainability, public health, and enterprise development. I wish to bridge the current gap of thoughtful analytical short and long-reads exploring some of the aforementioned topics in detail. The aim of this newsletter will be to throw some light upon offbeat non-traditional approaches to burning issues, and provide data-backed critical analysis as well as showcase potential solutions. I will also want to try and integrate a systems thinking approach to the issues at hand, going beyond typical “process” based approach, and analyse the interconnected systems in which these issues exist to provide a complete picture when possible.
I aim to write at least once a week, with some room to spare in case of more writeups coming up throughout the week. Please do reach out to me at aashir.sutar@gmail.com in case of any queries or recommendations for topics to cover.
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