[Jay attended the Sankalp Forum last week and files this report]
The Sankalp Forum is an event held annually by Intellecap with the purpose of bringing together members of the Social Enterprise ecosystem (entrepreneurs, investors, consultants, mentors, etc.) in India. The conference was held at the Taj Lands End in Mumbai on April 12th and 13th. It featured speakers from diverse backgrounds and perspectives to the Social Enterprise space. It was also a great space in which to network and create new contacts.
Of the talks and forums that were conducted at the summit, the forum on information technology for development was especially relevant to Awaaz De. Below are some notes:
- It is difficult to predict how users will eventually use a technology. Often preferable to just provide a platform and let users innovate on specific use situations. E.g. SMS technology
- For BOP and new users of mobile phones, its seen not just as a communications device but rather a portal to a wide ranging world of information.
- there was quite a bit of time spent on justifying VOICE as the best medium of delivering content over mobile phones from a development perspective. this seemed to be a widely accepted idea in the room.
- A rep from Uniphore discussed the use of voice recognition of keywords to deliver real time information by pulling the keywords out of speech by callers to identify an appropriate response.
- A farmer in the audience spoke up saying that all this information and access to info is good but really in the end they need basic innovations like refrigeration solutions, energy and water solutions rather than IT. In a similar note, a rep from a rural energy startup said that the IT/software industry had sapped all the mech-e, electrical-e, civil-e talent so that developing ‘hard’ technology was becoming difficult because of the lack of human resources. She even suggested that IT/software companies be taxed!
- Relevance – don’t develop a solution for a non-existent problem -> simplicity -> make products simple and useable for the end users.
