An elevator pitch in my perspective

After practicing an elevator pitch in our last class, I realized that selling a good product is not merely selling a good idea, but you need to also think about how to make the product sustainable in the market and how you “send the message” to the buyers. There are several aspects that should be prepared before you pitch your product, e.g. the estimated cost, how do you manufacture and market the product and the detail of how the product works. Furthermore, no matter whom you’re going to pitch your product to, you need to be concise, but also attractive, in your explanation. Less is better, as the valuable time of “catchers” means that you need to make your case in less time.

In contrast to how we build an argument academically, the framework of an elevator pitch should be reversed. Rather than building your argument at the beginning, it is better to start with “What is your product?” and proceed to answer the other 4W1H questions: Why do you think it is valuable? To whom are you going to sell it? Where are you going to sell it? When is the right timing to sell it? How are you going to manufacture it?

Furthermore, selling a product is more of building a connection with your buyers than selling an attractive idea itself. Thus, verbal and nonverbal communication is important when pitching an idea. I think trying to find a clue whether the catcher is interested in your idea during the first thirty seconds is a good way to tailor the way you communicate. As Kimberly D Elsbach (2003) explains, people use subjective judgments about you to gauge your product feasibility. Finally, the objective of an elevator pitch is to create an opportunity for further interests, not to sell a product, and it is an imperfect process, so I think effective communication is the important skill in this stage.

After reading the article "Knowing a Winning Idea When You See One," I was struck by the gap between most people's concept of how to be innovative and how (I would imagine) it usually happens. The type of structure outlined in the article is an excellent way to evaluate how an idea can be translated into a practical business idea. We usually think of innovation as a Eureka moments, but this article highlights how a structured approach to evaluating ideas can lead to success.

I'll take a moment to touch on this Eureka idea theme. I still think that will be the way many ideas come to fruition, especially when an innovator sees the need to improve upon an aspect of the lives of others. However, I believe we all have ideas, but don't know how to judge if they are good or not. I think using this frame work would help us evaluate whether we should further invest in such ideas. I would go even further and say that even in Eureka moments, innovators are unconsciously using such metrics to evaluate their ideas. Since we are in a start up mentality, I will use an example of the people we all love and hate at the same time: Venture Capitalists. I have learned in some of the business courses that I have taken that VCs use an unconscious method to determine what stake to take in a firm. However, when broken down, this formula is very standardized and follows very sensible valuation concepts. But when asked, the VCs claim it is just an estimate from the gut. Over much experience they have internalized these concepts so that they are now intuitive. I would posit that serial entrepreneurs follow the same phenomenon. This begs the question: how do we newbies get this ability? I would say, barring unlimited capital from which we could build experience through experimentation, that we should try to apply such concepts to ideas we see everyday. I would think that after extend use of such a framework, we would be able to build mental schema allowing us to evaluate these ideas quickly and efficiently. Subsequently, we should be able to innovate and pursue our ideas with great efficacy.

In the end, we still need creativity, but by developing such methods we can harness our creativity much more effectively. We need to be inquisitive about how we can improve lives, but I think we all have at least some degree of this in our nature. The key is to be able to capture this desire effectively. Really thinking about this framework and practicing it... then practicing it some more is the way to really make the leap from creating ideas to creating businesses. Just a thought...

So where to start... I have never blogged before, so please forgive me if I ramble. Maybe I will start with creating value. In classic economics, the exchange of goods are considered value creating if one side values it less and therfore sells it to someone else to whom there is a greater value. This allocation of resources increases net wealth per se. So the question for entrepreneurs becomes how can I create value for my customers. There are many ways to do this, but essentially those who value something will be willing to pay a premium for something. But two interesting facets are not taken into consideration- that of ability to pay and that of externalities. When considering a social venture these are two central aspects.

With regards to ability to pay, my understanding is that classically if someone is unable to pay they are considered not to value the resource enough to create value. I think this is obviously untrue. The story of Rockefeller's cat getting milk when babies go hungry comes to mind. How can the entrepreneur create marginal increases in value, or better yet create a product that allows a customer to bank value, therefore using such value to invest further. This would hopefully create further investment, having a "snowball" effect.

The other item to consider is externalities. In a two party process, how are third parties effected? Negative exernalities, such as pollution, can cause a degredation of the environment that people operating in. While the two parties may be better off, everyone in aggregate is worse off. There are positive externalities - ones that social entrepreneurs should focus on. I would focus on community empowerment. When those around you are thriving, you are generally more likely to thrive. Creating value this way is reinforcing and, I believe, an aspect of social entrepreneurship that is not only beneficial on a human level, but beneficially economically.

This naturally leads to the question of how social entrepreneurs can create value for their customers, while still considering ability to pay, avoiding negative externalities, and creating positive externalities. I believe that a focus should be on increasing productivity. While many other ideas are value creating, in an area of traditional focus, i.e. underserved populations, increasing process efficiency not only creates value for varying income levels and payment abilities, but generally it should create positive externalities. The ideas of moble banking or efficient water extraction and usage comes to mind. This not only can add incremental value for less affluent customers, but create positive economic externalities. This build community wealth and therefore is sustainable for entire populations. Promotion of products and services in this area are attractive for scare resources, but allow the resource pie to grow. This growth is the ultimate factor in creating rising living standards. No wonder the politicos are always talking about increasing growth. Everyone strives to increase the value at their disposal, so maybe ideas that allow them to do so should be first and foremost in the mind of a social entrepreneur. Just some thoughts...

Passion

In class this week, we practiced and presented our elevator pitch. I've always been very financially oriented given the fact that I have a concentration in finance. I think that I know the things that should be in an elevator pitch. You need to tell someone about the company and explain it so they can see the feasibility of it. You need to tell someone, assuming that it is an investor how much money you need from them, what kind of equity they will get, and most importantly how much they will get in return for their investment. However, the one thing that I think was missing from our discussion was passion. The investor isn't investing in a company, they are investing in you. My thoughts for this week have to do with being a passionate person so that people will buy in your idea. You have to be someone who "wears their emotion on their sleeve". If you are not passionate, how can you expect other people to be. This is difficult for me. For me, and I would imagine a ton of people, its hard for me to put myself out there, especially someone I've never met before largely because I'm somewhat afraid of failure, and putting an idea out there for other people to hear means that they will be aware if I fail as well. I think part of being an entrepreneur is not being afraid to fail. Think about the many people that have failed multiple times before achieving success. Donal Trump's companies have filed for bankruptcy multiple times! If you are afraid to fail, then you will never achieve anything. When you think about it, the most successful people are those that have taken risks. In order to be a successful entrepreneurs, but moreover successful in life, you have to be willing to take risks. For me, this means putting your ideas out there, knowing they may fail, but being confident that you can figure out a way to make it work.

Innovation in other parts of the world

http://vimeo.com/52711779

I watched this video this summer, which prompted me to enroll in the class Social Innovation Incubator. I have always wanted to start a business. Even as a young child, I use to host lemonade stands, where I would sell home made lemonade as well as other snacks, which I would purchase from the local grocery store and resell at the stand. During my time at Carnegie Mellon, I have taken many classes that dealt with Entrepreneurship. However, it was this video, which led me to Social Innovation. This video tells the story of passionate children in a poor town in Paraguay. These children have a deep admiration of music, but no money to purchase musical instruments. They talk about how music helps them in their every day life - it is a important part of the way they live. Since they can't afford instruments, they take trash from the local landfill and construct musical instruments. It is truly amazing. After hearing this story, one would think that the music they create must not be very good, given they are making instruments out of garbage and have very little instruction on how to play, if at all. However, if someone were to think that, they would be very wrong. The music they play is awesome. After watching this music, it helped me become passionate of social innovation. If you think about this one story, there must be countless of other stories. There is a huge disparity in technology all over the world. There has to be a way to take some technology that we take for granted here, and make small changes to help poorer people and even make a profit for it. I think about the Nokia example we heard in class about how Nokia sold "dumb phones" to people in another country, because they only needed the phone to do basic things. I know that if I look around the world, there has to be a way to create a business that takes technologies for granted and transforms the technologies to be helpful to people in another country and make a profit out of it. I think, and granted I may be wrong, that when most start a company, they are thinking about starting the company for the US, so there has to be an opportunity in other parts of the world and hopefully through this class I can come up with some good ideas to use.

-Mike Hahn

The Pitch

Last week’s in class exercises developing our elevator pitches and particularly the readings shed new light on the concept of catering your pitch to different audiences for me.  The idea of changing your pitch depending on the audience is not a necessarily a new concept for me.  I always understood the argument for making small tweaks to your pitch to fit the audience in front of you at any given time however I have recently given new consideration to the idea that a completely different pitch can be used to sell different audiences.  For example coming from a background in business I tend put a lot of emphasis on the business components of a pitch (i.e. the problem, market size, leadership team, the operating plan, financials, etc…) but for someone not as interested in business as myself (i.e. your rich uncle that just wants to help) these aspects of the pitch probably aren’t as meaningful.

A book I read recently, How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, helped enlighten this subject for me.  One of the big ideas that I took away from this book was how our brains make decisions.  Jonah Lehrer argues that our emotions play a major role in all of our decisions, even the ones that we think we are making completely rationally.  This suggests that by appealing to an individual’s emotions rather than their rational thought they will be more likely to be able to form a strong opinion of your argument (this could be good or bad). 

With this in mind I wonder if the best strategy when pitching to unsophisticated investors such as friends and family is to just drop the business jargon of market size, leadership team, and ROI etc… and just focus on the one or two aspects of the idea that is going to have an emotional connection with that person?  For a social venture I would imagine that emphasizing your cause is an ideal way to appeal to the emotions of your audience.  After all you would think that an individual’s desire to create a venture that seeks to solve a societal problem would speak to a potential investor more than an individual’s desire to create a new venture just to make some cash.  Although ultimately this probably really depends on who the investor is, it certainly seems like there are plenty of investors out there who really only care about earning a financial return on their investment. 

If kids can do it, I certainly can.

On Friday I stumbled on a short article in USA Today:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/02/07/youth-entrepreneur-workshops/1846633/

The first line of the article: "Kids used to want to be baseball players or rock stars. Now they want to be the next Steve Jobs."

The highlight is the growing popularity of entrepreneurship classes in middle schools and high schools. There are even hands on experiences for kids to get to test out their ideas.  Which made me think, geez if kids can dream big and put plans into action, so can I.  

Every part of being an entrepreneur scares me, except the brainstorming part, that’s easy, and harmless. You choose the people you are going to bounce your ideas off of; you avoid the naysayers and never lose anything if there is no action.  My idea would surely frustrate several groups, which has already been said by Professor Zak...that means you are doing something right.

I thought the pitches from class last week were excellent.  Clear, strong, to the point.  The questions Professor Myers was asking were helpful in terms of being prepared for the questions that would be asked when doing your pitch.  They also certainly helped to poke a few holes in my ideas which gave me time to flush them out a little more.   Two minutes, great! Thirty seconds will be rough.

Problem spot

As a designer I'm hesitant to claim to be able to solve problems without completely immersing myself in the environment that I want to design for. For this course I want to use my design background to solve pressing social issues in India because

1. India is my home and there are many issues that I have faced and seen that I've wanted to tackle.
2. India's growing economy is a great platform for social ventures.

Issues of access to clean drinking water, sanitation, education and waste management I want to eventually want to address. I feel, however, that I am not currently equipped to design for these issues because my distance from my target audience. Also I have no prior background of working in rural India. I've spent the last few weeks brainstorming on areas that I want to look into and I have finally narrowed it down to one area.

Last week's reading "Identifying Venture Opportunities" helped my hone in on my problem definition. As of now, my concept will look at supporting and promoting bicycle riders in Indian cities.

The problem

In my brainstorming session I looked at what the problem is and why I want to address it. From my own experience as a cyclist in a big city in India and from the stories shared with me, I drew out some key points. I also looked at research on bicycle usage in Indian cities.

What is my market?

When we talk about the "urban" population people associate rich urban bicycle riders. On the contrary, a large percentage of bicycle riders fall into lower middle working population who commute short distances daily. Literature even suggests that as literacy increases cycle ridership decreases. There is an emerging market of young professionals in cities who adopt bicycles as their mode of transportation for different reasons from fitness to low carbon footprint.

 What can I do?

 I have not narrowed the scope of my project with a single solution. I am currently exploring everything from services and cheaper safety equipment to policy level changes that need to be implemented. Something interesting I found was that under the JNNURM fund development policy makers want to include cyclists and infrastructure for cyclists as part of urban development. It will take a long time for that to be implemented but that validates my area of focus to some extent.

Digging Out for a New Social Venture

Four weeks ago, I decided to move forward into the social innovation world as an entrepreneur. It was more a conviction rather than a plan. I knew that I wanted to apply my efforts in this area, but I didn’t know how I could do it.

I have the same story as many people around the world. I am from a developing country – Mexico, where I have seen and faced many issues involving my community, my neighbors, and my family. I want to change that environment. I am a self-motivated young entrepreneur. What will make me special? What will give me an advantage to succeed as a social entrepreneur? Knowledge. Yes, the answer is knowledge.

I am enrolled in a graduate degree program at Carnegie Mellon University, a top-ranked university around the world geared towards innovation. I have access to knowledge, top research specialists, and new technologies. I have gained the analytical and managerial skills throughout my coursework, and now, I am part of a social innovation incubator. If I focus these advantages into my new social venture, I will definitely have a greater chance at success.

For now on, this blog will serve to relate my experiences in creating a social venture from zero. The idea is to share information about the development of a social venture in a social innovation incubator, and to provoke an interesting discussion on creating social ventures. In this entry, the message is to think about what can make you special, or different in starting a new social venture. My next entry to the blog will explain more about the process to find an idea for social innovation.

Target Customer Segment Dilemma

From a bottom-line perspective, clearly identifying a target customer segment is a critical step to defining and executing a strong market position and achieving financial sustainability.  From a social impact perspective, targeting different customer segments can dramatically alter a venture's social impact.  We're taking the class to build a better yacht and improve the social life of billionaires...

I'm pursuing an urban farming venture that uses an emerging technology (aquaponics) to drive economic development in low-income urban neighborhoods.  The intended social impacts we hope to catalyze include:

• Transforming vacant land from community liabilities to community/economic assets
• Diverting food waste from landfills into agricultural inputs for our business
• Mitigating food deserts (growing food within them)
• Creating jobs that are accessible to our neighbors but also decently well-paying and with upward career mobility and opportunities for employees to grow within or without our business
• Improved neighborhood quality of life and improved perception of the neighborhood

As I best understand it now, a tension exists between our goal of financial sustainability and our goal of producing food that is affordable for our (lower-income) neighbors.  I have yet to come across a successful urban or family-scale-rural farming business model that does not rely primarily on driving high margins through direct sales and marketing to the fresh/local/organic consumer market.  Selling to high-end restaurants and farmers' market shoppers is a critical success factor. 

My current assumption is that low-income urban segment is not able to completely support an economic sustainable urban farm.  While farmers' market prices are not necessarily higher than grocery store prices when you account for quality/organic/local/freshness, low-income customers by necessity are more focused on price.  Since we eliminate the overhead of transporting our product 50 miles into the city to sell it, we can lower our prices slightly below typical rural-farmer-at-city-market prices. 

In addition to price, the problem of brand awareness creates a challenge to cultivating customers from within our neighborhood.  At farmers' markets, we can immediately access customers who buy into our value proposition (hyper-local, environmentally sustainable, supports economic development, etc.)  They also patronize these markets for other goods (bundling effect.)  While I think our neighbors will buy into much of our value proposition (especially if we can pull off being excellent neighbors,) will they shift shopping habits just for one head of lettuce?  If we aren't bundling our product with other products, it will be more difficult to break into our neighbor's shopping routine.  I myself settle for crappy Giant Eagle lettuce because it's better than a more crappy driving experience to Whole Foods and back. 

So the tension is this:

1. Focus on "conventional" urban/local/organic farm customer segment, drive higher margins and settle for growing food within food deserts that is mostly sold to food oases.  higher margins, lower social impact
2. Focus on selling food in a way that appeals to neighbors on price and otherwise and settle for lower margins.  lower margins, higher social impact

My current "plan" to navigate this tension is start out by driving the highest price I can command.  If it isn't profitable at the highest price, then there is no point going further.  If it is profitable AND achieving the other desired social impacts, experiment with how to incorporate sales to low-income customers.  Some ideas for this are:

• Form a separate non-profit.  
• Partner with another organization whose mission is to address food deserts and who can help penetrate the market and/or provide subsidy/grant funding.
• Pursue a barter pricing model.  If we can calculate the value of food waste to our composting/aquaponic system, give a per pound discount to neighbors who bring their food waste and want to purchase food.

The ultimate goal is to break the tension here.  I think some of the assumptions supporting it can be overcome--namely that low-income consumers don't value fresh healthy food as much as middle and upper income consumers.  The problem may be access to, not preference for, healthy food.  Particularly when transportation costs across Pittsburgh's rivers and hills are factored in for those who don't own a car. 

Blogging to the extreme

Having taken classes with Prof Zak before, I know from experience that I'm not a great contributor to class blogs. Coming into this class, I wanted that to be different and the way I found to motivate myself to be a better contributor was to create a blog of my own about my social venture's development. But, honestly, I created it for more than just to make me a better participant in this class. I was also looking for a better way to get feedback about my social venture idea, to force myself to overcome my own insecurities about being a social entrepreneur and one interested in race specifically, and to create an accountability system to keep me on track towards my goals.

To all of these ends, I would love it if you all, as fellow social entrepreneurs, would follow my blog as well and comment with any thoughts/critiques/support/etc you have. You can find me at:

http://amberleenorris.wordpress.com/

I have to admit putting myself and my ideas out there for all the world to see has been intimidating, but it is getting easier and I think it is going to be crucial to making me a successful social entrepreneur. If you, too, are struggling with your own insecurities in your journey to save the world, I recommend challenging yourself in a similar way.

Turning a Vision into Reality

  As we have discussed in more than one class period everyone has ideas, that's the easy part. But turning  something into reality can prove to be a intense grueling process. Each time I leave class I always leave with more questions than answers (not sure if that's a good thing). But as our readings and very own Professor Tim Zak has touched upon, failure often times the best teacher. A common trait that most entrepreneurs share is that of being fearless. Things won't always work out the first, second, or even third time. We must be constantly be find tuning our project at all moments.

 Which leads me to our class project. When speaking with my partner (Pedro) my thoughts are going a thousand miles a minute. I think of the possibility a project like this can have not only in Mexico but also in Latin America. Yet, I think about the challenges that may confront such a project such as receiving funding from investor, the viability of the project and the most important thing how can we keep the dream a reality.

Moving forward I want to focus on business model and strategy. Additionally, the elevator pitch feedback we hopefully receive from Professor Zak and our classmates will be invaluable. Since we are providing a service to individuals with very little resources, the toughest part of our project will be convincing potential investors that our social venture will be profitable.


Since all of us our currently working on social ventures that we hope blossom into reality one day, what strategies, readings, or past experiences (wether your own or not) have helped to shape your elevator pitch and business plans?  

Catchers as Creative Collaborators

Among the articles we read this week, a few points particularly jumped out at me.  Specifically, the ideas that:

• ·      It is important for the catchers (people to whom we are pitching) to view themselves as creative collaborators.  As said by Oliver Stone, “pull back and project what [the catcher] needs onto your idea in order to make the story whole for [him/her].”
• ·      Present this innovation as something that will change people’s lives.

These points rang true with my personal belief that most people are driven by a desire to be part of something bigger than themselves and that many people want to help – they just need to know how and why it is important.  

The articles also provided some good advice on what to avoid (work with people instead of arguing and listen courteously to feedback) and raised some questions for me.  For example, as a neophyte, how does one effectively balance establishing credibility without eschewing the benefits of being a neophyte (i.e., showing a need for mentorship)?  And, as a neophyte, how do we get consumers to believe in our idea?  Also, how do we maximize an opportunity to send additional information to catchers?

Attempting to Turn Ideas into Actions

Identifying problems is not the issue; turning the problem into a solution, followed by action.…

Here is the cross road the doe-eyed, self-identified do-gooders stand. 

The discussion in class from the article Identifying Venture Opportunities, using educational background, travel, contextual knowledge, etc. to help recognize prospects helped to give the green light to a wave of issues, passions and experiences.   The article notes that the “dominant source of venture ideas is prior employment” (Venture Design), when your prior employment consists of three US public schools, it’s easy to allow the wheels to spin into all hours of the night. 

While typing, new ideas are circling around.  Writing them on paper has certainly helped, but does everyone get a light bulb moment? Can you get several light bulb moments?

The education system in this country is plagued by an achievement gap that many creative minds are diligently spending all of their hours addressing.  Charter schools, magnet schools, school reform, policy changes, online schools, new teacher training programs, advocate groups, non-profits, all existing out of the need to make systemic long term change of how we teach our children. 

 

Thinking big is inspiring, "what if money wasn't an issue, there was no push back to innovative change, policies were enacted quickly, teacher training is overhauled and replaced, children are properly fed at school..."

The opportunity space is large enough, the problem is certainly big enough, and the timing is certainly now, or yesterday. 

How do we move past the discovery phase where there is so much work to be done?

Paving the Way for Higher Education

The higher education sector is nearing a crisis point – tuition costs are rising higher and higher, making affordability more difficult for American families.  Students are carrying more student debt than they ever have in history, hampering their matriculation into life after school.  If those conditions were not worse enough, universities still feel pressure to reinvest in plant and equipment to keep pace with competitors, raising institutional debt service and capital costs over time. 

These pressures have created a new space for entrepreneurs to be successful in provided they can find ways to better manage costs and improve the financial solvency of tuition-based, built-out campuses.

A new company, Pave, has come up with a new idea for helping students finance their educations without incurring such large personal debt.  Pave arranges for private investors to take an equity stake in individual college students in exchange for future payments from the student’s salary.  Pave’s website pledges that “backed” students are put on 10-year, affordable payback plans so that this investment structure pays off for both parties.

Last week, we reviewed a matrix that distinguished start-ups between conventional and innovation applications of their products and business system.  In this case, Pave is offering a conventional business system in that investors have been able to purchase equity stakes in investment vehicles for a long time. 

However, the innovation is in the product.  College students have never been considered investment vehicles that could carry equity stakes, nor have students had a method for pledging future wages to private investors (that were not banks, at least).  So far, eight students have entered into Pave’s system and received backing from private investors.

As someone exploring new methods for student finance myself, I can appreciate Pave’s efforts to give students options beyond traditional debt.  It strikes me as ironic that more private companies have not sought to enter the student debt space with new products.  In this case, Pave may have create a new product within an existing business system that gives college students chances they otherwise may not have.

Are their other industries nearing a major turning point that could benefit from a new product or business system?

Source:

http://pave.com/

Opportunity Search

Our discussions around identifying venture opportunities covered various approaches to venture ideation.  Since my first exposure to entrepreneurship in undergrad I have always contemplated which venture ideation strategy is best.  For the purpose of this discussion I will focus on two different approaches, the ‘problem first’ approach and the ‘technology first’ approach.  I have always believed that the ‘problem first’ approach is best however I read a book recently, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, which has caused me to second guess this view.    

The ‘problem first’ approach to venture ideation starts with a problem (i.e. company A needs to frequently send messages back and forth to company B) and then explores ideas (i.e. phone, email, hand delivery, etc…) to identify the best solution for that problem.  This ‘problem first’ approach is largely the methodology for product innovation that I have been taught to use by the Master’s of Product Development program at CMU.  In my limited experiences this approach seems to be very successful at yielding better solutions to problems.  However, a limitation to this approach that I see is that it inherently limits us to only creating solutions to known problems.  Sometimes the best innovations come about to solve a problem that we are not even aware of.  

Another approach to venture ideation is starting with a new technology (i.e. conductive polymers) and then searching for a problem (i.e. illumination, circuitry, solar power, etc…) to solve with the technology.  In my experience this ‘technology first’ approach is typically leveraged by entrepreneurs with close affiliations to research universities, which are able to provide the entrepreneurs with a wealth of new technologies to test in the marketplace.  I believe this is an inherently more risky approach to venture ideation due to the tendency to want to quickly pick a problem that seems the new technology can address without fully considering whether the new technology is really the best solution for that problem.  However, many of the groundbreaking innovations (such as the transistor, the laser, and C++ programming) that came out of Bell Labs in the 20th century can be attributed to this approach.  

So the question remains is the ‘problem first’ or ‘technology first’ approach the best approach to venture ideation and most likely to yield a successful venture?  Both sides have a compelling argument and like many ideas in entrepreneurship it is hard to formulate a black and white answer.

Thank YOU!

I would like to thank Professor Zak and each of you for making this class experience so spectacular. You really do learn a lot spending an entire semester turning a passion into a reality, and watching others do so as well :) Being with such an empowering bunch of folks has really helped me come to terms with the fact that I'm graduating, and it's time to get out and change things, bottom-up and in an innovative way. Could we continue posting to this blog? Would love to hear updates from everyone!

Our team eagerly awaits the results of the Dell Social Innovation Challenge for our water purifier solution for rural communities in India. The five finalists will be announced next week. Today, I met with Josh Knauer, truly a phenomenal person. Before I explain my purpose in writing this post, I have to go on a slight tangent. Josh is currently CEO of Rhiza Labs - a business intelligence start-up that strategically develops ways to easily visualize and communicate data. They do some really cool stuff, including equipping Brazil's fierce Surui tribe to partake in the carbon market and reap the benefits of carbon offsets. Rhiza has equipped the tribe members with a smartphone that includes GPS tracking, a camera, and web capabilities that will enable scientists to construct maps of the rain forest and calculate carbon offsets. Rhiza collaborates with Google Earth to implement this solution.

Speaking of collaboration, Josh suggested our Neer (water purifier) team to explore opportunities with Wello, a social venture that utilizes a WaterWheel to give people in Rajasthan, India easier access to potable water. The Wheel carries 5 gallons of water, enough to meet the needs of a family for a day. http://wellowater.org/the-issue-our-solution/

This opportunity excites me and I'm excited to convey it to our team.

So, as a lot of interesting ideas rush, twist, turn, spark, and flare through my head as a result of this class, I am so thankful that they are now ideas with catalysts for implementation and set of instilled guiding principles. This came from our class. What's more, Ketaki, something you said during your Hult success really resonates with me -- "you don't need to change the world by yourself." There are amazing opportunities for collaboration out there, and I'm every ready to join in on the fun!

Thank you! All the best to everyone.
Amy

The journey we take ...

Time and again we have listened to several entrepreneurs tell us that social entrepreneurship is a journey; not a destination. You start with an idea, one that according to you will make a significant social impact, and then you start building a business model around this idea to make it sustainable, and generate at least a basic revenue stream. Nothing big, just enough to get you by.

Slowly you realize that your initial idea was not as impactful as you thought it would be. Either that, or you realized that people would not be willing to pay any money for it. So, you revise it and start the iterative process: will this be sustainable, will it target the market I am aiming for, will people be willing to buy my product, will I be able to generate a cash flow .... you add and you subtract, you bend forwards and backwards, you spend sleepless nights writing feasibility pitches and chalking out business plans, you practice your pitches - 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes and 5. Soon you have become a tiny part of the world of social entrepreneurs - all wanting to change the world in a small but significant way.

As I write this last blog before the end of semester, I realize how fortunate I have been, and maybe fortune had nothing to do with it, maybe it was persistence. If you keep doing new things everyday, you have less time to focus on things that did not work out, and instead you are always looking forward to the next thing that might actually work. As I started the year, I interviewed with the best consulting company - which did not work out at all as I had expected. I simultaneously received the confirmation that our team made it past the first round to go to Boston, but I was I so upset about the consulting company that I did not celebrate that success. Soon school started and I kept applying for one competition after another, one scholarship after another, knowing that SOMETHING would give. The Hult competition was such a farfetched victory that I never really gave it second thought until we won the regional finals in Boston.

Then came the Dell Social Innovation Challenge, and I was a little more upset about not getting into the semi-finals than I expected. By that time, however, I had started a process of getting over things that did not succeed much easily than ever before. Be really upset, mope around a little, and then move on. I think the biggest thing I have learned in this journey, other than the technical aspects of how to survive in the world of social entrepreneurs, is the skill to keep at it. Pick yourself up, and start again, and again ... until something just works right and your life changes forever. It will happen, and in some cases, if you put your soul into your work, it will happen sooner than you think. But don't give up. We all have some amazing ideas, and have gained a slew of skills to make the ideas work. All it needs now is our commitment. That, and the ability to fix our processes when things go wrong, instead of lamenting about our failures! I would like to end with another favorite quote:

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.”
-Henry David Thoreau