Our Story
What is SIL?
The Social Innovation Lab (SIL) is a testing ground for driven young entrepreneurs to tackle existing social challenges by combining humanistic knowledge with sustainable business practices. Our ultimate goal is to catalyze the reimagination and remodeling of contemporary societies.
We empower socially-conscious individuals to design innovative solutions to contemporary global challenges, to validate their solutions within local communities and tailor them to become financially sustainable in the long-run. We actively chart the progress of these entrepreneurs in generating social impact, and share this knowledge with its cross-cutting network of social innovators, development actors and investors to foster the growth of social enterprise and the formation of interregional partnerships.
The Lab seeks to leverage the knowledge it produces to become a regional think-tank, providing policy recommendations and technical assistance to decision makers on innovative methodologies and their implementation. This will eventually result in a more equitable distribution of resources and the creation of more sustainable, human-centered institutions at the regional and global levels.
Why SIL?
SIL is Pakistan’s only social enterprise engine that walks its client through the early stages of business development, from idea generation to implementation. Entrepreneurs approaching the Lab are introduced into an environment fostering creativity, self-criticism and adaptivity to the needs of the communities to which they cater.
The Lab was founded in 2013 to propel the growth of social enterprise in Pakistan and nurture the bare-bones idea of socially-conscious entrepreneurs into path-breaking businesses geared towards regional scalability and financial sustainability. This is an especially important mission given the dearth of platforms in Pakistan that cater exclusively to the needs of social enterprise in its nascent stages.
SIL sets itself apart from other enterprise growth engines with its indigenized processes and mentorship program which puts its beneficiaries at the heart of the business development cycle. The Lab is also committed to charting the Pakistani landscape of social enterprise and fostering a regional and global knowledge-sharing community of development practitioners, innovators and investors committed to promoting social innovation in the present and future.
The Hatchery
SIL’s flagship incubator, The Hatchery, is a nesting ground for driven young entrepreneurs to tackle existing global challenges by reimagining and remodeling contemporary business practices. It is Pakistan’s only incubator tailored exclusively towards the needs of passionate social innovators, big on ideas but lacking in the means and experience required to actualize their vision.
The Hatchery’s indigenized training curriculum and mentorship program combines humanistic perspectives on poverty alleviation, rural development and inclusive marketing with the latest insights on sustainable business.
The incubation cycle consists of four phases, through which the Hatchery team nurtures and tracks the development of its fellows’ business plans from ideation to implementation.
• Warming Up, the first phase,attunes incubatees to the structure of Pakistan’s entrepreneurial ecosystem with sessions on organizational development, design thinking and idea generation.
• Cracking Shells, the next phase, requires incubatees to conduct inclusive market research and rapid prototyping to validate their ideas and tailor them to the needs of target beneficiaries.
• The penultimate phase, Stretching Wings,includes sessions on Organizational Registration, Cash Flow Forecasting and Advertising that prepare incubatees for the process of setting up legal business partnerships and developing recognizable market profiles.
• The last phase, First Flight, prepares incubatees to attract funding for their businesses at an Investors Meet, imparting sessions on public speaking, pitching and business plan development.
HamariKiyari
SIL’s experimental fruit-and-veg garden, HamariKiyaari, is located within LUMS, and is already supplying organic fruits and vegetables to faculty members and staff residing on campus. SIL ensures that the gardening staff is trained in organic and ecologically-sustainable gardening techniques, which are employed all year round at the Kiyaari.
SIL plans to establish the Kiyaari as Lahore DHA’s premier organic fruit-and-veg distributor and organize regular markets where residents can purchase organic produce at affordable rates. Aside from establishing the Kiyaari as a sustainable business venture, SIL also seeks to utilize it as a laboratory for the application of new ideas and production techniques, ranging from human centered design to eco-farming and the deployment of “appropriate technologies”.
The Kiyaari team actively documents the learning and experience it gains in the application of such techniques and seeks to develop it as a scalable model for sustaining the production of local and organic fruit-and-veg within cities.
