Tech Awards Honors Social Entrepreneurs

Al Hammond of Next Billion writes about attending the Tech Museum Awards in San Jose last week where hundreds of CEOs, developers and engineers gathered to honor some of their exceptional peers. It just so happens that this year those honorees were mostly Social Entrepreneurs…

I had the opportunity to attend the Tech Museum Awards ceremony last week in San Jose, California. What’s interesting about this annual event is not just the social entrepreneurs and their sometimes quite remarkable innovations, but also the way Silicon Valley turns out to honor them and, at least for an evening, to focus on applying entrepreneurial skills to benefit poor people. This year the event was attended by some 1,500 people including many of the Valley’s wealthiest and most powerful Venture Capitalists, CEOs, and networkers.

The mix of enterprises changes every year.This year was especially rich in BoP energy enterprises with seven entries. The prize winner was Distributed Energy Systems India, or DESI Power (desi means land or village in Hindi), which builds biomass power plants to generate electricity in villages that lack access to it. DESI trains locals to run the plants and also incubates local businesses that need power and enlarge the customer base for the model.

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