"We would say that one of the major players in India is the government sector. We have to work with the government sector to sensitize it – to leverage in such a way that we can use the existing resources to have a wider impact."

Billimoria is part of a group social entrepreneurs in India who decided to pursue systematic, carefully planned training of government workers in the field of child protection, with the help of the corporate sector, including leading management consultant Arthur Anderson and media consultant Ogilvy & Mather. They calculated they could train more than 100,000 government workers in 15 cities in India "if we had a systematic city and state level plan worked out, [creating] a synergy between government, technical inputs from the corporate sector, and the NGO sector converging to anchor this process," Billimoria said. "And that would lead to a larger change."

The group also brought in management students from the academic sector to document the process "because ultimately they are the students who are going to join the corporate sector," Billimoria said.

"So these are the sort of interlinkages that we are looking at to produce larger systems change. . . . This is what we want to work on when we talk about building bridges between the corporate sector and the NGO sector, and having innovators joined together to work towards social change."

Billimoria said social entreprenuers bring a lot of energy and dynamism with them, "and it is this fire that we carry forward to the corporate sector . . . [to build] this bridge to the corporate, academic and government sectors. That is what I think building partnerships is about."