The InnovatED Story
Explore The InnovatED Story video series here.
“In life, when challenge meets opportunity, magic unfolds.”
This is a story of opportunity and challenge — and InnovatED’s journey of navigating them both to create something valuable.
The Opportunity
Early on, we realized that there was an opportunity to infuse high-potential organizations into the education ecosystem in India — to address different aspects of education — from public schools to parent leadership, scientific thinking to student voice.
Teach For India, further, represented a steadily growing pipeline of entrepreneurial talent, that could be leveraged to generate a wave of innovative organizations addressing varied aspects of education.
The Challenge
For an early-stage entrepreneur, however, the challenge remained of trying to navigate the complexity of establishing and sustaining a new organization.
When Challenge met Opportunity
We recognized that there was a compelling case for providing foundational support to promising early-stage education entrepreneurs — to enable them to create the impact they held the potential for.
It was in this endeavor, that InnovatED was born.
InnovatED was conceptualized as a platform for enabling early-stage entrepreneurs to cross the valley of death — one that exists between a promising innovation and a sustainable organization.
Currently, InnovatED supports entrepreneurs through a combination of the following 6 elements:
1. Access to Funding
InnovatED provides seed funding to each entrepreneur worth $5000, over a nine-month period — in the form of an Innovator Stipend.
Given that early-stage entrepreneurs often lack the financial wherewithal to support themselves while starting out, access to this funding helps entrepreneurs sustain themselves during this critical period of organization-building.
Beyond the monthly Innovator Stipend, entrepreneurs have the option of making use of a small amount of additional capital (known as the Innovation Fund) — to pilot new ideas and explore game-changing experiments.
In addition, InnovatED has an annual Demo Day — where entrepreneurs get an opportunity to showcase their work to a coterie of investors and ecosystem influencers — seeking funding, forward connects and feedback.
2. Access to Dedicated Coach
InnovatED provides access to a dedicated coach — who is invested in both the entrepreneur and their organization’s development.
The coaching relationship is multi-faceted — focusing on the entrepreneur’s personal growth, the development of the core team, as well as the organization’s development.
3. Series of National Innovation Bootcamps
Every quarter, the cohort gets an opportunity to converge from different parts of India — to build connections with each other, forge meaningful relationships with ecosystem influencers, and assimilate practical knowledge and tools around organization-building.
InnovatED kicks off with BaseCamp, progresses to MidCamp and reaches fever pitch with Summit, our closing event for the year.
The Summit marks the finale — with entrepreneurs graduating out of the program — and into the larger collective of InnovatED entrepreneurs.
4. Peer Community of Entrepreneurs
One of the unique features of InnovatED is the sense of community it engenders.
InnovatED entrepreneurs represent an interdependent community — where individuals not only learn from one another, but together support each member of the group.
While the sense of cohesion within a particular cohort is strongest (owing to the shared experience), no less important are the intergenerational connections that bind different cohorts.
InnovatED is committed to enabling connectedness within and across cohorts — to bring to life the program’s long-term theory of change of:
“Fostering an interconnected community of entrepreneurs who will create collective impact on India’s education landscape — and together build a new narrative for education in the country.”
5. Access to the Ecosystem
Ecosystem partnerships are the lifeblood of InnovatED.
Our philosophy strongly aligns with the old African saying — “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Since 2017, InnovatED has engaged with over 50 organizations, in small ways and big — with a focus on leveraging the best the ecosystem has to offer, and more importantly — to ensure that we carry the ecosystem along in our journey.
6. Knowledge Toolkit on Org. Building
Navigating organization-building may be a challenging proposition, but it doesn’t have to feel like a labyrinth.
The 6 P’s Framework developed by InnovatED simplifies this challenge — and helps entrepreneurs look at organization-building from the lens of six key building blocks — Proposition, People, Proceeds, Processes, Partnerships & Promotion.
Based on this foundational framework, InnovatED has created InnovatED Insights — a one-stop learning platform on organization-building. This combines with micro-learning videos (below), to form— InnovatED Online, our digital initiative for entrepreneurs.
The icon on the top right of the video screen provides access to the full playlist.
As part of InnovatED's next iteration, we will also be introducing a framework on Entrepreneur Development, to complement our current framework on Organization Development.
Our ecosystem of support
InnovatED combines 3 strands of input to create an ecosystem of support for entrepreneurs:
- Physical (series of national innovation bootcamps, coach visits)
- Virtual (monthly cohort calls, dedicated coaching conversations)
- Digital (InnovatED Online, which includes InnovatED Insights and our series of learning videos)
These 3 strands play out through the 6 elements of InnovatED’s offering below:
The timeline for these 6 elements is illustrated:
Our Entrepreneurs (2017–18)
Over the last two years, InnovatED has supported 15 early-stage education entrepreneurs working across varied aspects of education — from School transformation to 21st century skills and Early-childhood education to Parent leadership.
The playlist below brings to life the story of these entrepreneurs:
The icon on the top right of the video screen provides access to the full playlist.
You can also view one-pager profiles of our 2017 and 2018 cohorts, for more context.
InnovatED’s Impact
2017
InnovatED’s support combined with a strong commitment to organization-building enabled our 2017 cohort of entrepreneurs to collectively achieve a 100% increase in the number of children impacted, a 70% increase in team strength and a 150% increase in fundraising capacity.
In 2017, InnovatED had a Net Promoter Score of 58 (>50 is usually deemed excellent) — with the most frequent rating being a 10 (out of 10).
2018
Once again, InnovatED’s support combined with a strong commitment to organization-building enabled our 2018 cohort of entrepreneurs to collectively achieve a 300% increase in the number of children impacted, a 30% increase in team strength and a 90% increase in fundraising capacity.
In 2018, InnovatED built on its strengths and received a Net Promoter Score of 100 (highest attainable score). Once again, the most frequent rating was a 10 (out of 10).
In addition to the above, InnovatED gives every entrepreneur access to a personalized Organization Health Tracker tool which records key organizational indicators, thereby capturing the progress of each entrepreneur over their incubation journey.
Short-term theory of change: InnovatED
InnovatED sees its short-term theory of change play out in the following way: a strong incubation experience leading to knowledge, skills & connections being developed in the entrepreneurs, enabling them to succeed at organization-building — resulting in the intended impact for the individual at the last mile.
Long-term theory of change: InnovatED
InnovatED’s long-term theory of change is:
“Fostering an interconnected community of entrepreneurs who will create collective impact on India’s education landscape — and together build a new narrative for education in the country.”
InnovatED: Our Evolution
Like the ventures we support, InnovatED itself has been an entrepreneurial initiative within Teach For India which has gone through its own journey of evolution.
Before pivoting towards supporting only full-time entrepreneurs in 2017, InnovatED ran it first two pre-incubation pilots in 2015 & 16, intended to build capacity in early-stage innovators.
25 such projects were supported — many of which are thriving today as established organizations or ongoing initiatives —such as Alohomora, Dramebaaz, Khwaab Welfare Trust, Khel Khel Mein, Samait Shala and Videos For Knowledge.
Teach For All: Locally Rooted, Globally Informed
A big part of what InnovatED has been able to achieve, as well as what it has been able to contribute — has been owing to the presence of a collective of social innovation catalysts dedicated to laying the ground for and supporting the most promising education innovations across the world.
Asia Pacific
At the Asia Pacific level, network partners in Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh and Nepal have joined hands with Teach For India to exchange resources, best practices, and experiences—with a focus on ensuring that early-stage education entrepreneurs across the region have the best shot at being able to transform their promising innovations into sustainable organizations.
Global
At the global level, a wider community of social innovation catalysts representing 14 countries (from Belgium to Bulgaria, and Austria to Armenia) would have come together up to three times by 2019 — in London, Bangalore and Santiago respectively — to push the collective’s understanding of what it means to provide world-class support to early-stage and aspiring education entrepreneurs across the world.
Follow InnovatED’s journey
Visit us on Instagram, Youtube, Medium, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
[About the author: This article was written by Shayan Roy Chowdhury.]
