CSR cannot be an afterthought

Kartik Kilachand, the CEO & co-founder of Magnus Gyan, is a serial entrepreneur with a focus on India-US initiatives. More recently, he moved to being a social impact entrepreneur - leveraging technology for providing skills training for under-privileged youth to create employment opportunities. He tells 'India Investment Journal' about his journey so far and the motivation behind his serial entrepreneurship.

I have been an entrepreneur nearly all my life, except for the first five years after my graduate studies at University of California, Berkeley, when I cut my teeth at GE HQ in New York. All my ventures have been India-US driven - products and services from India sold primarily to the US market place. This was way before India was on the global radar but I had innate belief in the India story.

By 2010, India's information technology services had acquired a niche of its own and I observed that many successful Indian IT entrepreneurs - both in the Silicon Valley and Bangalore - were investing their dollars in tech-led education start-ups. This was going to be a disruptive gamechanger - high quality education provided at affordable price points to everybody, instead of the privileged few. I had been privileged to be the product of very high quality education (IIT Bombay; UC Berkeley; Cornell University) and was very conscious of the tremendous opportunities such an education had provided me.

So six years ago, when I hit the “pause-refresh” button on what I wanted to do in my life moving forward I hit upon a potential solution to impact India's under-privileged youth by providing them affordable high quality adaptive education leveraging technology.

Setting a fresh roadmap

I was always skeptical of traditional NGO [non-governmental organisation] models - primarily because they were not scalable and hence could not make a significant impact. My roadmap to make a difference was to revolve around social impact entrepreneurship - a for-profit vehicle which would be scalable and sustainable with a clearly defined social impact outcome.

The central aim was to help under-privileged youth get jobs in the digital economy of the future, combining all three of my passions - technology, education and entrepreneurship. I felt it was time to give something back. One of the initiatives I had started in 2008, the World BPO/ITO Forum, had become the Davos of Global Sourcing Events - an Annual two-day knowledge sharing conference in New York. I met Madan Padaki, founder of Merit Trac - India's leading assessment company for the ITO/BPO industry, which he had recently sold to Manipal Global Education.

We started brainstorming on how we can enable under-privileged youngsters with similar opportunities that could lead to them achieving the same success we had. This led to the birth of Head Held High (HHH; head-held-high.com) What started as an experiment with eight under-privileged youth from one of the 100 poorest districts in India (18-25 years of age) who had never been to school, HHH has now skill trained and created employment for over 3,000 such youth.

The vision now is to scale this model to train and create employment for 1 million plus youth over the next five years.

Decoding Magnus Gyan

One of my colleagues from Brazil, Robert Janssen, had a boutique consulting firm called Outsource Brazil, which helped Brazilian IT companies look for customers outside Brazil and represented the Brazilian government's IT ministry - Softex. Both Robert and I had this strong belief that the traditional transfer of technology model from North to South, which had prevailed over the last 200 years post Industrial Revolution in the West, was becoming more and more irrelevant.

Technologies developed in one growth economy would be far more relevant/applicable to another growth economy - what I call the South-South model. This is specifically more relevant in the three big domains of education, healthcare and agriculture.

Quite simply, wouldn′t a technology developed for sugarcane crop yield enhancement in Brazil be more relevant in the farms of Uttar Pradesh than a similar technology developed for the farms of Idaho in the US Given the similarities between India and Brazil - 50 per cent of the population under 25 in India and 45 per cent in Brazil; 325 million students in India (25 per cent of the population) and 56 million students in Brazil (also 25 per cent of population) - coupled with India's prowess in IT and EdTech, one could use India's advantage in EdTEch and make it available to Brazil In parallel, whilst growth economy governments were spending billions of dollars in bringing “last mile” internet connectivity to the poorest of its citizens, the missing link was the “last person” connectivity - since the price of a PC never dropped below $500.

Hence, whilst you had affordable adaptive educational software, the low cost delivery vehicle was still missing to make it accessible to the many. It just so happens that a Director of IIT Jodhpur, Dr Kalra, had his R&D team working since 2008 on developing a “Low Cost Access Device” - the word Tablet did not exist till Apple launched its ipad in 2010. IIT Jodhpur launched a $50 Tablet in 2011 on the same specs as the then Samsung Tab. I met Dr Kalra at IIT Jodhpur.

After many hours of brainstorming on my South-South vision of using a low cost tablet loaded with adaptive affordable educational software (Math/Science/English) from India to be deployed to under-privileged youth in Brazil, Dr Kalra agreed to have IIT Jodhpur license its technology for a “Low Cost Access Device” to us for Brazil. And, Magnus Gyan (magnusgyan.com) was born.

Quantifying success

In my view, in order to define success, one first has to be very clear on the “WHY” - most people confuse the reason for doing what they are doing. They focus on the “how” or the “what”. In both initiatives, our “WHY” was to create employment for the under-privileged; although it appears we are a skills training entity, that is the “what”. So the success in our case is easily quantifiable by our students getting jobs.

The “how” is using a demand-driven skills training model instead of the traditional supply-driven educational model. In my view, the current model of companies spending a certain percentage of income on CSR [corporate social responsibility) is flawed. The concept of having a CSR division in a company is non-effective.

CSR cannot be an afterthought; it has to be at the core of the organisation. You cannot have a VP heading the company's CSR initiative - every employee from the Owner/CEO down has to own it. In order to be a truly impactful CSR organisation, the entire DNA of the company has to be what Sisodia/Mackey define very clearly as “Conscious Capitalism” - the inherent good of both society and capitalism.

Featuring some of today's best-known companies, they illustrate how these two forces can, and do, work most powerfully to create value for all stakeholders: customers, employees, suppliers, investors, society, and the environment. These “Conscious Capitalism” companies include Whole Foods Market, Southwest Airlines, Costco, Google, Patagonia, etc. You only have to walk into a Whole Foods and you can tell you are in a different ecosystem. Once again, it boils down to the “WHY” your organisation exists. The WHY can never be the pursuit of only maximising shareholder value (most current enterprise models); making money is an outcome, not the reason for being (raison detre).

Replicating models of success

We are in the process of discussing a pilot with 200 displaced youth on the “War on Terror” in Colombia. It is providing the same three modules of skill sets using HHH's six-month MagicWand programme: English; Data Entry and Soft Skills of leadership, team work, confidence, etc. Leveraging technology for education is a game-changer for all growth economies. Clearly define your “WHY” first and the “how” and “what” will follow. Think Big from the beginning - social impact organisations do not imply a small-scale side activity. It is important to manage it as you would a regular organisation. In a long-term game like this, the challenges are enormous but so are the rewards.

Kartik Kilachand, the CEO & cofounder of Magnus Gyan, is a serial entrepreneur with a focus on India- US initiatives.