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The case can be used at undergraduate and postgraduate level, in management development programmes or in Executive Education programmes.

Social entrepreneurship, social inclusion, business model innovation, sustainability, strategy design and strategy execution.

The case explores the development of MITTI Café, an organisation that trains and employs individuals with intellectual, physical and/or psychiatric disabilities to work in inclusive kitchens and cafes in India. The protagonist is the founder of the café, Alina Alam, who has won several international awards for her work. The case highlights Alam’s approach and how she is trying to challenge societal and business perspectives relating to disability. From 2017 to 2021, Alam has scaled and operationalised the business, building her core team, leveraging several partnerships with stakeholders and putting into place offerings, processes and procedures that created a sustainable business model and blueprint.MITTI Café aligns itself with several of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with sustainability and social impact at the core of its strategy. As Alam considers the future in July 2021, what else needs to be taken into consideration to scale either within India or abroad?

Following reading and exploring the case, students should be able to identify how social exclusion and inclusion manifests in a business context, and how social entrepreneurship ventures such as MITTI Café can address this challenge; identify capabilities in the context of people with disabilities; recognise how stakeholder relationships can be leveraged as a force for good and for growth, and address SDGs through social enterprise; identify and categorise resources and capabilities within organisations; evaluate opportunities for growth and scale.

The case explores how the protagonist is challenging the concept of “ability” and through her work with the differently abled providing scalable opportunities for social inclusion and dignity.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

Cognitive drivers of opportunity identification and development are important in entrepreneurship. This study examines antecedents of opportunity development among women founders of digital platform start-ups, defined as technology-mediated sites that facilitate user interactions, processing of transactions or other innovative practices. The opportunity identification and development literature framed our exploration of drivers into digital entrepreneurship among women in a middle-income economy, an area under-represented in prior research.

This research uses in-depth interview data with women founders of five digital platform start-ups in South Africa. The authors supplemented primary interviews with secondary data from a global big data site to provide context for how investors are funding women-owned start-ups in the country.

Entrepreneurs’ heightened alertness to opportunity developed from a confluence of factors such as personal values, impatience at the slow pace of change in post-Apartheid South Africa, corporate ennui and building for-profit business models driven by social purpose. Respondents had multiple identities, including gender, culture and generation that influenced their development as entrepreneurs and their adoption of digital platform strategy for start-up ventures.

Multiple factors influence women entrepreneurs during the opportunity identification and development process as they enact the creation of digital platform start-ups. The authors recommend additional research linking opportunity identification and development to gender in emerging markets.

South Africa is witnessing the emergence of women-owned digital platform start-ups that attract risk capital investment. These entrepreneurs are university educated and use prior corporate experience to create growth-oriented companies that government should support.

The study contributes to opportunity identification theory building based on context, specifically how the concepts and strategies can inform new models that include women entrepreneurs.