New Delhi: The Nasscom's CSR arm, Nasscom Foundation (NF) is organizing a Social Innovation Honors which aims to showcase projects that demonstrate best practices through the use of ICT in areas of social transformation. The winners of the Honors will be announced at the trade body's India Leadership Summit in February 2009.

In creating the platform for the Honors, NF aims to identify projects where innovation could be in the form of both a process and a result. In looking at the process, NF aims to understand systems based on transfer and sharing of knowledge across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. For it, a social innovation can be a product, a process, or a technology, as well as "a principle, an idea, a piece of legislation, a social movement, an intervention, or some combination of them". The Stanford Social Innovation Review defines social innovation as "A novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just (fair) existing solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals."

Deciding on the honors will be a body of jury comprising of Narayana Murthy, Jaithirth Rao, Kiran Mazumdar and Kiran Karnik. The achievement of social development through the use of ICT innovations could be in terms of increased education, better health and hygiene, employment or entrepreneurship opportunities and environment. There are three categories for nomination ICT innovation for the community (non-profit), ICT led business model innovation (for profit) and Government ICT led business model innovation. Speaking about the relevance of the Honors, Kiran Karnik, Trustee, Nasscom Foundation said, "Nasscom Foundation is initiating the Social Innovation Honors to recognize excellence and encourage innovation in social development initiatives."