I came across, by chance, what promises to be a very interesting venture.

A group of Indian youngsters are launching a social venture called The Spark Group. They have been educated at Ivy League universities such as MIT Sloan and Yale. Ayan Sarkar and Priya Naik - two of the founders - have worked with Nobel Laureate Prof. Muhammad Yunus in Dhaka.

The Spark Group is an idea incubator working at the grassroots level in India. Using insights from academic research, the Spark Group develops promising ideas into commercially viable business ventures that deliver valuable services to poor communities. The Spark Group is funded, in part, by the IFMR Trust and is supported by The Boston Pledge.

The projects include Spark Accreditation - in which for a fee, any school can receive a letter-grade evaluation of its quality. Another project is Spark Guru - a teacher assessment service where trained teachers would be sent to identified schools and enhance the learning capabilities of children. Also in the pipeline are initiatives in the space of technology solutions for microfinance and education investment.

The venture is just starting off. In the meanwhile, the team in the process of studying success stories from India. The Spark Group Blog is an interesting capsule of their progress and of education in different parts of India.

Given an impressive team of management and advisors, one hopes that a new breed of organisations like The Spark Group can finally bring sustainable solutions to issues like quality education in India.

Last week, I sat in a conference room full of DC development-types over lunch, listening to a presentation sponsored by the Society for International Development.  It was standard stuff - the woman next to me was reading the New York Times as folks shuffled in, and I spotted a few people I know who work for DAI, Chemonics, and other development contractors.

As the event was gearing up, however, it became clear that it was no regular brownbag lunch.  First, the room was totally full - no offense, but these sort of events aren't usually so compelling as to attract 50 people on a Wednesday.  Secondly, I started to see people I know from outside the "development" world.  Fred Tipson, Microsoft's Senior Policy Counsel here in DC, slipped quietly into a chair towards the back of the room.  Then Eric Gundersen and Alex Barth of Development Seed, a local website development firm, sat in my row.  Not the usual lunchtime crowd for a SID event.

The large, diverse crowd had come to hear from Jeff Galinovsky - and I can't blame them.  Jeff manages Intel's Emerging Markets Platform Group, and is intimately involved in their World Ahead program.  He's an interesting guy, to say the least.  Trained as an engineer, he's worked for Intel for 14 years and has seen their emerging markets strategy evolve over time. 

Back in the day, an "emerging markets strategy" for Intel involved taking their older technologies (n-1, n-2 in Jeff's engineer parlance) and selling them overseas.  Simple - but not that effective.  Seeing an untapped market opportunity, Jeff and his boss pitched the idea of a for-profit Rural Connectivity Platform to Intel CEO Paul Otellini.  The platform would go local to assess needs first, then move into product development - a reversal from what Intel had done in the past.  It seems straightforward, but for a major tech firm in the post-dotcom era, the Rural Connectivity Platform concept was and is a big stretch.  

Meanwhile, Intel's philanthropic arm and their capital department began to work in emerging markets.  To make them all work together, Intel developed World Ahead, a sort of umbrella to tie the business side in with the philanthropy and the investment parts.  World Ahead is driven by four elements - Accessibility, Connectivity, Education, and Content.

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