’Keep your clients close, and your suppliers closer’: Institutional partnerships for activising solar energy entrepreneurship in rural India

Renewable Energy Technologies have transformed rural lives in several developing and BRICs lands with a growing number of public, private, international and partnership model-based energy enterprises in the industry. This research investigates how solar energy entrepreneurs in rural India are supported, built and developed by a private renewables company which is structured with a highly interactive stakeholder management portfolio. Notwithstanding the standard description of social innovation, this research shows a ‘for profit’ company operating with a ‘social motif’ that incubates several other similar enterprises in its image instead of scaling up across lands and users/clients. The research additionally illustrates different types of income generating solar energy-based enterprises in rural India. The primary data collected from qualitative interviews with private renewables enterprises as well as rural solar energy entrepreneurs who are perceiving these emerging alternative technologies as an ‘asset’ rather than an ‘add on’ energy option. A systematic thematic analysis is used to evaluate the research data and the work concludes with implications for development practitioners and policy makers in alternative energy, entrepreneurship development and rural development; in addition to building empirical knowledge and understanding of renewables application in a leading BRICs land.