Purpose
This paper aims to build upon the various studies conducted on the ecosystem and expands the understanding of the ecosystem of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in India. The discussions in this essay entail a literature review that analyzes the discourse on the ecosystem of MFIs, and based on this an attempt has been made to conceptually design a model for the ecosystem of MFIs in India.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors design the “Indian microfinance ecosystem model” based on the actors in the broader financial ecosystem (Bloom and Dees, 2008; Ledgerwood and Gibson, 2013) and the capital infrastructure and the context-setting factors of the social entrepreneurship ecosystem (Dees et al., 2008) that best describes the Indian MFI scenarios.
Findings
The ecosystem of MFIs in India is found to be very complicated. The interactions among numerous actors – who are core product or service providers, facilitators, client, beneficiaries, resource providers, competitors, complementary organizations, regulators, opponents and influential bystanders. The authors also observed that the capital infrastructure and context-setting factors such as policy, politics, media, economic and social conditions are equally crucial for the MFIs to survive and flourish. Moreover, the ecosystem is also dynamic and could change with the environmental conditions and entry of new entrants into the ecosystem.
Research limitations/implications
Understanding the ecosystem of MFIs from the strategic perspective would also be of interest to stakeholders such as donors, investors, banks, government and so on. For MFIs, knowing their place in the ecosystem is an essential step in determining their strategy.
Practical implications
Understanding the elements of the ecosystem would help MFIs to assess whether they have achieved the minimum critical environmental conditions in the ecosystem for their business model to succeed.
Social implications
Better understanding of the ecosystem will help create social benefits through better service delivery to the low-income population.
Originality/value
Expands the existing business ecosystem literature by extending it to the social policy, social entrepreneurship and more specifically to the microfinance sector. Fills a void in ecosystem literature by designing a comprehensive ecosystem model of MFIs in India. Understanding the ecosystem would help market system actors and facilitators to understand what they have to do to achieve their objectives of participating in the ecosystem. Knowing their place in the ecosystem is an essential step in determining what they should do and how they should do it. In addition to MFIs, it could have important implications for policymakers, particularly the government, that are trying to achieve financial inclusion.
There is growing concern among management educators regarding how to keep their graduate and undergraduate students engaged in their classroom. Even educators who rely on the relatively more engaging case method of teaching have expressed concerns over inadequate preparation of students, their reluctance to read the assigned case and their relatively lower attention spans. Graphic novels or comic book cases have emerged as one of the formats that some educators have started experimenting with. But do cases in comic book format aid learning? If so, how? What are the issues and constraints in designing and deploying such cases? Are there limitations? And what’s the way forward? While reflecting on our experience of designing and deploying a comic book case, we find that this format may not be a silver bullet to tackle all the problems faced by instructors today, but it has great potential to drastically enliven any classroom.
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