IngCare: Tough Choices for Social Entrepreneurship

Ing Care was founded with the vision of using technology to improve rehabilitation services for Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), in the hope of giving all autistic children access to effective treatment and intervention. In this sense, Ing Care was a social enterprise committed to creating social value by addressing social problems. During the eight years after its founding, Ing Care offered online training courses for autism therapists, and introduced the Verbal Behavior-Milestones Assessment and Placement Program ("VB") to provide patient-specific and individualized rehabilitation training, disrupting traditional practices. However, VR met a lukewarm response, forcing Ing Care to build its own rehabilitation facilities to endorse VB. Moreover, Ing Care designed a rehabilitation curriculum map and a digital platform for curriculum implementation and management, and made these products accessible to other rehabilitation facilities, medical institutions, and parents of autistic children. To grow its business, the company had brought in professional managers, who raised issues of cross-cultural conflict. In spite of this, by early 2022, Ing Care had two lines of business: one was to operate 15 self-owned high-end rehabilitation centers; the other was associated with transferring its capabilities outward (for example by creating the IDEA Inside brand, setting out exemplary models of IDEA teaching, and helping medical institutions to build an autism screening system. While the two business sectors presented both opportunities and challenges, Ing Care's founding team faced a strategic positioning dilemma: As a social startup with limited resources and capabilities, Ing Care had to decide on the relative emphasis it should place on opening more rehabilitation centers versus empowering other industry players to avoid spreading itself too thinly.