The Integral Entrepreneurship Lab (IEL)

What are the origins of the Integral Entrepreneurship Lab?

Gijs: The lab is partly a continuation of a work that had begun some time before. A group of us had been involved in incubating and supporting entrepreneurs in Tamil Nadu through UnLtd. Tamil Nadu. At the same time, we had also been helping quite a few Auroville units, like Wasteless, Koodam and Ecofemme, to improve their operations.

Aurelio: The origins of this latest initiative can also be traced to a reflection on the sustainability of the Auroville economy that took place in the Auroville Board of Commerce (ABC) about a year ago. The ABC for the last years has just been fulfilling an administrative function and some people attempted to bring in new initiatives and ideas. Nothing concrete came of this fresh impetus but some interesting ideas came up that we are now bringing forward.

And some of us still remember and are inspired by the big community meetings several years ago on what it would mean to do business in a different way from the outside world. We also had an inspiring international conference on Business and Conscious-ness here, with cutting-edge thinkers and pioneering entrepreneurs in the field.

The term ‘social entrepreneurship’ is very popular these days, and I have heard it used by people in this group in connection with your work. What does it mean?

Dhanya: It is doing business for something useful, meaningful, of value to something greater than oneself. The term came into existence recently, but I think many Auroville businesses have been doing this for years.

Gijs: Somebody argued all Auroville units are ‘social enterprises’ because they all belong to the Auroville Foundation. I think this is a misconception. Social entrepreneurship is really about the intention with which you start your organisation. It is when your intention is something larger than yourself, larger than just profit maximisation, whether the objective is to solve an issue in society which has not yet been solved or to be a community-based project in Auroville.

But you are approaching it in an entrepreneurial way, which means that you are focusing on opportunities rather than challenges. Entrepreneurs have a vision and a passion; they are manifesters. They are creating solutions to real problems. We need to reclaim this term ‘entrepreneurship’ back from a narrow interpretation of it only being confined to profit maximisation.

Daniel: At the same time, for me profit is important as the search for profit involves a tireless attention to avoiding waste, inefficiency, as well as ensuring the quality of the product and the welfare of the staff.

Aurelio: I think the basic principle of the capitalistic system is individualism, based on individual initiative. People are who are more socially-aware tend to be more interested in socialist or communist models of the economy where there is more equal distribution. Social entrepreneurship tries to bring the two elements together. Mother always said there is a ‘third’ way, and that is what we are exploring.

Is this what you mean by the term ‘integral entrepreneurship’?

Gijs: Yes. It means you are using your organisation not only to meet a real need but you are also using it to do inner work, to learn about yourself and grow into your own potential. And you do it in a responsible way. For example, you don’t have a renewable energy company that pays minimal wages because this is not being integral, holistic.

Clearly, you set up the IEL to respond to a need. What is that need?

Gijs: During the recent Retreat, there was much talk about distributing a lot of resources within the community, for education, buildings, services etc. But where are these resources to come from? Auroville needs to be generating income to do this. One function of the Integral Entrepreneurship lab is to explore how to do this and to support those who would like to incubate new income-generating projects.

Aurelio: I think in the Auroville economic landscape there is a change of paradigms. Many of our old bigger units have closed and now there is a shift to the knowledge economy. However, we felt there were no facilities to share information about this new economy between us. I went through this process of starting a business unit out of what was originally a social entrepreneurship programme, and then having to invent everything from scratch because I couldn’t find anybody to teach me the ropes. There was no mentorship.

We have this amazing resource in this community, the people who have been experimenting with doing business in the context of karma yoga for the last 30 or 40 years. But we have hardly documented these experiments. So one of the tasks we have set ourselves is to make this knowledge available for the young generation to build upon and experiment with further.

Gijs: We are also trying to change the climate around business in Auroville. As a very concrete way of bringing the topic to the Auroville community, we are planning something like a TEDx event where we can share inspiring ideas, and learn to see business not as something evil but as something inspiring.

Torkil: The Auroville economy is highly complex. We have collective ownership of units by the Auroville Foundation but the unit holder has a lot of freedom. It’s a very strange combination of pure capitalism and pure socialism but it seems to work in many ways. For example, one of the strengths is that all the units are carried by the passion of the people who run them. However, this personal aspect makes it a little difficult for the units to work together, and there is a succession problem – the people who run the units find it difficult to hand on the work to others. So part of the work of this group is to find ways of making sharing and succession easier.

Daniel: I think the main problem we are confronted with is there are not enough people in our income-generating units, and many of the new people who start up units only want to do business outside Auroville. But we need energy to be put inside Auroville as well.

What has the IEL been doing so far?

Gijs: We’ve got an office and a place to meet in Upasana, thanks to Uma. And another office is being prepared in Auromode as a start-up place. A design and production-oriented space is also planned, probably it will be at CSR.

We had an Open House in April. We invited people from established commercial units who wanted to consolidate their ecosystem, and we asked each of them to identify the three things they needed help with the most. The top three topics were human resources, marketing and fundraising. So now, every month we are organising an Open House on one of these topics. We just did one on human resources, the next one will one will be on marketing, and probably one on fundraising and resource mobilisation will come later.

The idea is that by organising such activities we form a community of practitioners who meet together to discuss their challenges. On these open days we offer best practices and ideas from the larger world of business, but my experience with the incubation process has been that peer-to-peer learning works best. You are much more likely to take advice from somebody you can identify with.

Daniel: Regarding incubation, an idea came from this group for a Knowledge Centre, where Auroville know-how and experience is displayed in one place. This can be both a window to the world and also an inspiration for people to begin new start-ups in Auroville.

Torkil: We are also working on a starter kit so that people planning start-ups don’t have to reinvent everything from scratch.

We also have established a relationship with the Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. They are looking at the Auroville economy with interest and asking the same questions about it as we do. We are at such an interesting stage of the experiment. From being a cottage industry, either we will become a knowledge economy or we will develop more into the luxury market which, in India, is growing steadily.

The Institute of Management actually runs a course called ‘Çrafting Luxury and Lifestyle Businesses’ and they have made one space available on each course for an Aurovilian (Uma is attending one at present). Each course concludes with a visit to Auroville.

Aurelio: The IEL initiative is only one of four or five initiatives of the Economy Forward group, a group that came out of the Retreat and which is focused on bringing more energy and more income into the Auroville economy. Other people in this Group are focussing on issues like in-kind contributions for full work participation. If you take these four or five elements together you have a full picture of what we are trying to do.

Do you think the kinds of shift you are envisaging will happen gradually, or are there one or two levers that could shift the economy much faster?

Gijs: One of the big questions is why are not many of our units living up to their full potential? There are a number of bottlenecks. One of them is the marketing issue. There seems to be a certain level of scale when you are not big enough to hire a professional marketing person, but if you don’t do that you are never going to grow. It’s Catch-22.

That’s why we are talking about things like shared services. If four or five units get together they could employ one solid marketing team and this could help all of them shift to the next level. Another bottleneck may relate to human resources. Another might be capital. The Unity Fund is sitting on many crores which are being invested who knows where. If you reallocated some of that to the local economy, it could make a huge difference.

Two or three interventions like this could have a big leverage effect on the whole economy.

Daniel: If we can achieve the in-kind society, where everybody’s essential needs are looked after, then doing business would become yoga rather than a way of subsisting day-to-day. It would give income-generation a completely different aspect.

Torkil: I think we are not taking advantage of the fact that people outside see Auroville as one brand. We have a good name in India and very strong brand identity. As unit holders, we all have our strengths. If we can all try to work together more, rather than as separate entities, we can take better advantage of that brand identification. That to me is one of the things that would really make a change.

Gijs: One theory states that change happens when more and more people have positive experiences of doing something because this inspires more people to do it. It’s a virtuous cycle. So bigger changes can start with a little group of practitioners like us who get excited about doing things differently and who support each other to realize their visions.

“How can I keep control over the quality of my clay products once I start hiring people?” “How can I retain talented women employees once they get married?” “How should I design my project so that it can cope with seasonal demand?”

Aurovilians have built projects that they are passionate about. They want to make sure that they give their customers the right product quality; they would like to pass their passion on to their team. And they are really keen to get practical advice from peers.

This was the objective of the Human Resource Management Forum held last Saturday by the Integral Entrepreneurship Lab at Vérité. That day, the famous Aurovilian Pizza boxes from Tanto contained food for thought. Organized around four stands, tools currently in use by successful Aurovilian ventures like Marc’s coffee, Upasana or Svaram were presented to help new project holders to help address their most urgent HR challenges.

The idea was to share experience and best practice among peers. After a round of introduction of the different tools, we discussed in two circles the most popular topics:

– How do I make sure that I build an organisation culture that is aligned with my values?

– How do I make my employees feel that training is a reward rather than a punishment?

Finally, inspired by the discussion, everyone wrote a plan for his own project.

What did the group like best?

– The open exchange of past experiences in the discussion circle

– The opportunity for informal discussion at the coffee break

– The fact that we left with an action plan

What are the next steps?

The next session will be hosted before the end of September, and the selected topic is marketing. Join us there!

The Integral Entrepreneurship Lab report in Auroville’s News and Notes of 22nd August