Albert Einstein once quoted “Necessity is the mother of all invention” and this quote today stands true to many a heroes who are setting new rules to the game by creating opportunities for the Base of the Economic Pyramid, giving new hopes to the millions of faces who live below the poverty line and are part of the India we are calling the next billion.

I count my personal experience here. In  a recent interaction with the Managing Director of one of India’s largest Innovation Labs, who said and I quote “if you need to learn innovation, go do it from Social Entrepreneurs”.

I agree no less to this statement. Its not just about being a for profit business, its about making an impact to the market you are serving. Social entrepreneurs do not innovate with big funds backing their research and exploratory initiatives, in fact they innovate out of necessity. They innovate because they see addressable gaps to be plugged and understand that they need to come up with solutions which are different and achievable with limited resources.

In the previous posts on the Innovations for Sustainability blog, we have shared many working examples of “How do you sell to a family earning less than $3 a day and still create a for profit business?”

There are many instances of how Social entrepreneurs are changing the entire perspective game and how the youth is contributing towards change for the rural India. The India Knowledge@Wharton highlights the quest for Economic Equality and how it is crucial to address poverty alleviation while actually impacting the BoP, while highlighting the case of Dr. Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Prize Winner in 2006 who started Grameen bank and also collaborated with many for profit companies in creating unimaginable propositions of growth for the people.

Powerful enough to change the world, a single statement which says: we created a loan program for beggars in Bangladesh, and that too any beggar. To see the entrepreneurial abilities of beggars and out of a 100,000 beggars, in the past 4 years, 10,000 have stopped begging.

The Innovations for Sustainability blog is one such platform which is helping emerging entrepreneurs working towards creating new opportunities for many at the Base of the Economic Pyramid in India. We invite you to NOMINATE any ventures you know, who are working on a disruptive innovation to address the challenge of clean, cheap and sustainable energy for the rural India.

Apart from contributing to the cause of common good, you also stand a chance to win $3000.