Role of Technology in sustaining and empowering Social Startups

Abstract

The project tries to identify startups that are generating more value than the inputs they intake and calls them social startups. We try to understand how these social startups are using technology to achieve this. The role of technology is broadly categorized into two types namely, type one where technology is used as a facilitator for the core business model or idea and type two where technology forms the core aspect of the business model. After conducting personal interviews with founders from both types, patterns about the role of technology have been identified. It has been observed that Type one startups are constantly overhauling their technology frameworks based on their business requirements whereas type two startups have done additive changes to their technology and built other business modules around the technology in order to facilitate it. Hence, it is advised that the type one social startups assess their technology needs keeping scalability, reliability and ease of use in mind when designing.