Entrepreneurship for social innovation

Ashan Kumar met Nirosha Kodituwakku, Archmage (Pvt) Ltd. Director and eBusiness.lk CEO to understand How IT changed his life.....

Connect with the columnist on www.prwiresl.com/blog

The idea of social innovation has become more prominent with ongoing research, blogs and websites (such as the social innovation exchange), and a proliferation of organizations working on the boundaries of research and practical action. Several currents have converged in this area as of recently.

Social innovation refers to new strategies, concepts, ideas and organizations that meet social needs of all kinds - from working conditions and education to community development and health - and that extend and strengthen civil society.

Over the years, the term has developed several overlapping meanings. It can be used to refer to social processes of innovation, such as open source methods and techniques. Alternatively it refers to innovations which have a social purpose - like microcredit or distance learning.

The concept can also be related to social entrepreneurship (entrepreneurship is not necessarily innovative, but it can be a means of innovation) and it also overlaps with innovation in public policy and governance.

Social innovation can take place within government, within companies, or within the nonprofit sector (also known as the third sector), but is increasingly seen to happen most effectively in the space between the three sectors.

Recent research has focused on the different types of platforms needed to facilitate such cross-sector collaborative social innovation.

Currently, social innovation is becoming increasingly important within the academic debate, also regarding its theoretical concepts.

Entrepreneurial businesses and small and large corporations play complementary roles in today’s complex economy. History shows us a common pattern. Small, start up entrepreneurial firms serve as incubators for new ideas. Most of these experiments fail, but a large number also succeed.

The ‘winners’ in this competition often attract outside interest and large companies with greater resources, then give a boost to the most promising innovations through investment or acquisition. For example, the Internet company Hotmail was started by an independent entrepreneur, funded by venture capitalists, and then acquired by Microsoft for $400 million.

Another recent example is Merrill Lynch’s investment in Archipelago, an online stock-trading network that has applied to become an electronic stock exchange.

“I earn online, you could easily say that my life depends on IT. IT has changed my life dramatically. If I don’t have access to internet and if my iPhone is not in my hand - I feel uncomfortable mainly I have a feeling that I may lose valuable customers.

IT vastly affected me, five years back I gave up reading books and started a new obsession, ebooks’, were the thoughts of young and dynamic Archmage Director and Business.lk. CEO Nirosha Kodituwakku.

An old boy of D.S. Senanayake College Colombo Nirosha, 26, is a very energetic youthful individual with a strong visionary insight, which according to him is inherited through his mother Mallika Kodituwakku earlier Bank of Ceylon IT Head.

He acknowledges his traits of being an all rounder was passed on by his father. His brother is a Oracle Consultant living in Australia. A passionate ruggerite and table tennis player, Nirosha had an early start in entrepreneurial thinking, he explained, ‘I started computing at Grade 7, with a “486” machine. However my target was to become a Doctor and was using IT to support my cause.

While my friends were referring books I enjoyed peeking to online materiel for answers.

He talked about his first eBusiness venture, ‘I did my first website in GeoCities Custom Pages (Yahoo venture) at 14 (1999).

My mother is still amazed how I put an “Egg Cracking Animation” a simple GIF file, to the page those days”.

At 14 I was doing eBusiness and using Overture, Cost Per Click ads on my Web-pages. I think I had about $15 worth clicks that time’ he recalls.

I probed into his thoughts on why he chose IT as his future, ‘After trying two times to become a doctor - he realized he was skilled enough to follow an IT degree. He went for a Diploma class in NIBM and wanted to dig deeper. While people were learning about static codes he was thinking about very dynamic functions. He built few Dos Games and a Piano from “C” language. He recalls ‘Suddenly I was thinking around IT and wanted to start something big. I stepped in to computing and started studying at Informatics Institute of Technology for my BSc. in Computing and Information Systems. I was extending myself in to lot of dynamic and advance coding structures. When I code I wanted it to be user-friendly and effective. When my first year ended many of the program assignments of the batch were done by my self’.

During this period, Nirosha’s passion for real life web solutions was growing and his interests on the degree was decreasing. His limitations were easily broken as his ideas to build an own Software Company brightened up. As a result of hard work together with his friends, put to action, in 2005 Archmage was born. From there onwards Archmage was his one and only dream. ‘I even sacrificed my “first class” to bring up Archmage’, he said.

His first successful entrepreneurial idea was a Laboratory Reporting Application called Medi-Lab. Many Sri Lankan Laboratories cannot afford the expensive Laboratory software that are used by larger hospitals.

He led a team to develop a web based distributed application which was successful and is currently utilized by two noteworhty Hospitals. This experience gave him the edge over any other member in the batch and he was selected as the first choice to Virtusa a leading software company origins in Sri Lanka.

Soon after his degree he was called to Monvia - the Yahoo Development Centre Sri Lanka where he led the Online Marketing team. ‘There we developed one of the most successful projects in my history. NewMoon.com currently the number one Children Magazine and Online Portal for girls 10-13 in USA, in addition to this two other major projects I participated are LoanBack.com and FastOrder.lk’ he commented on his exposure. Now I’m back on Archmage.

Coping with an evolving industry is key, especially in the ICT industry, continuous research and reading and learning is pivotal says young Nirosha. He spends at least 2-3 hours a day reading many of the new techniques and good articles on eBusiness. He quotes ‘Whenever I get in trouble with some code / or one of my co-workers get stuck - I chip in with researching and finding the solution. This keeps us one step ahead of any other competition’.

“I would say our “IT workers knowledge” is far better than the rest of the world. This is why Lanka is listed in the Top 20 outsourcing destinations for IT/BPO. I would see this wealth of knowledge is the key to our development as a country.

However many super brains do leave the country. This is why we are not growing - we are losing our heroes. Sri Lanka is one of the best places to start IT/BPO Company.

“We have enough quality resources. What we lack is good project managers and quality marketeers,” he said. Kodituwakku stressed on professional training and improving the quality of courses to grant a fresher an opportunity to gain industry knowledge and standards early in their career cycle. “IT needs to be a compulsory subject for O/L and A/Ls,” Kodituwakku said.

In the near future Archmage plans to launch Bungalows.lk Web Solution. This is the first ever API and Reservations Application that will give access to any bungalow owners in Sri Lanka. Bungalow owners can manage their reservations and get exposed to online customers when they register.

On the other hand online visitors can compare prices and book the most suitable for them, making it a win-win situation for both parties. A simple solution like this will be less hassle for the customer and builds a more efficient platform. IT solutions like these will eventually help Sri Lanka to grow rapidly and earn through tourism.