Chennai: The Indian School of Business (ISB) has entered into an exclusive partnership with Helios & Matheson Information Technology Ltd, a healthcare IT services company to promote the "Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC)".

GSVC is one of the most high profile competitions in the world for scripting innovative business plans and setting up social ventures that have clear and quantifiable social objectives and are financially sustainable.

The Asia semifinal presentation round will be held at ISB on March 9-10, 2007.

A total of 118 business plans were sent in from 26 schools in 7 Asian countries for the preliminary evaluation round. Part of the entry requirement was that the business plans include a "Social Return on Investment" (SROI) analysis, which requires the teams to think through how their social impact could be quantified.

A separate prize that is awarded to the most innovative SROI analysis, for which 16 teams have been short-listed through preliminary evaluation.

The jury includes Hammer award winner Matthew T A Nash, Sara Olsen, social entrepreneurship expert, Vijay Mahajan, graduate of IIT Delhi, IIM-Ahmedabad and a fellow at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public International Affairs, USA and other eminent venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

The winning presentations will be competing with entries from other continents in the finals to be held in Haas, Berkeley, USA in April 2007.

According to V Ramachandran, chairman, Helios & Matheson, "The focus is to encourage social entrepreneurship - entrepreneurship in unsexy sectors- that are for profit businesses and have potentially high social impact."