Tilak Mishra

Wantrapreneur: Villgro’s Search for Societal Wealth Creators

The ultimate goal of economic development is to build sufficient assets and create wealth. In a Schumpeterian view, entrepreneurship creates and also distributes wealth and income, as well as political power, within societies cost-effectively and improves social welfare by harnessing previously overlooked, dormant talents. In order to identify and encourage such talents, Villgro is promoting “Wantrapreneur”, a business plan competition to encourage the process of creating and evaluating new ventures that have a central focus on the creation of social value.

Wantrapreneur aims to discover entrepreneurial passion looking at market based models to serve the rural poor. The idea was primarily conceived with the vision of providing social entrepreneurs a window to showcase their innovative product / service models, and to provide a supporting environment in order to tide over the challenges they would face in realizing their ideas reaching the market and impact thousands of lives. The key sector focus for this business plan competition would be agriculture, energy, water and dairy with a special emphasis on market segments that target the rural poor.

The vision of Wantrapreneur is to attract both product and service based business plans and will seek entries from entrepreneurs both in the start-up and early-growth phases. Separate entries are invited from entrepreneurs who are in the agriculture sector in both the phases while other sectors such as water, energy and dairy will be clubbed and evaluated together. The finalists will then be invited for a mentoring session in November on how to make an effective pitch following which they will make a final pitch on 2nd December to a jury comprising of philanthropists, investment experts, and social entrepreneurs.

The winners will be recognized and awarded a cash prize up to Rs.1,50,000 in each category at the Grand Finale and will also have a chance to receive incubation support from Villgro provided other incubation criteria are met. Wantraprenuer 09 was a huge success with close to 100 applicants of which 10 were shortlisted and invited for a mentoring session before they made their final pitch to the Jury.

Wantapreneur is accepting business plan submissions until October 15. To learn more, click here.

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