Intellecap is a social-sector advisory firm serving corporates, non-profits, development agencies, and governments working in developing markets.  The company facilitates investments, provides consulting services, and builds knowledge and information focused on scalable and sustainable development initiatives, both in India and globally.

Journey participant Natalie Chou has spent much of her career exploring the intersection of the private, public, and social sectors. A young professional who has worked within finance in New York and is now starting her own enterprise in Beijing, Natalie has also been very involved in establishing the non-profit Junior Achievement China.  As she describes in this post, Intellecap's work and impact provides key insight into the realm of social enterprise.

At the intersection of sustainability, profitability and social responsibility

After all of the Calcutta site visits, Hyderabad was a chance to pull back to 30,000 ft (or 91,400 m).  I started thinking about the bigger questions I arrived with around social enterprises in particular, so I was looking forward to the visit with Intellecap, a social sector advisory firm.  Given my interest in strategy and business development on top of that, I was very curious about the Intellecap story and model.

Intellecap occupies what seems to me an uneasy but potentially incredible space between what is traditionally considered private sector and public, or social, sector: a hybrid business.  The company’s primary mission is to help social enterprises mainstream while being sustainable itself.  Like the Acumen Fund, Intellecap works with enterprises reaching the poor and underserved in areas of demand but no or substandard service while also achieving the trifecta of sustainability, profitability and social responsibility.

The Intellecap model

The model has clearly met success.  What started as a bootstrapping operation of 2 has grown to a practice of 60 professionals in 3 offices and project forays into Africa.  There are now three major divisions: Advisory Services (consulting and investment banking), Sector Building and Incubation.  “Inter-related solutions to address all strategic & functional needs” being the sandwich, Sector Building work in publications and research was described to us as the bread of the practice, consulting the butter and investment banking a pure chocolate spread.  Incubation sounded like a relatively new and opportunistic area, but nonetheless was an impressive and ambitious added goal.  A microfinance-in-a-box project called Intellecash is currently in the works.  Intellecap also provides some tech solution development to its clients.

Overall, I feel Intellecap did well articulating its role in the ever-expanding social enterprise ecosystem.  However, I wish we were able to delve more into the minutiae of its strategy and banking work as I have some reservations there.  As they say, the devil is often in the details.  That said, I hope Intellecap’s success is evidence of a movement towards companies adopting more blended approaches.

Moving forward

I left inspired by what I could transfer to my current context – China – but with many questions still on the social enterprise space, questions that may be equally reflective of the sector’s nascent but exciting and formative stage.  While it would be convenient to believe the market and its dynamics are a panacea to the world’s problems (or the opposite), we need more people who are willing to step into the gray and grapple with the push-pull of profit and principle.  The level of vigilant introspection but also rapid adaptation required to maintain balance in a social enterprise constantly impresses me.  I look forward to seeing more of this dialogue in action as we work, sometimes in faction and other times collaboration, towards a better world.