This week's reading on "Disciplined Entrepreneurship" was useful, but I'm going to take it with a grain of salt. The article highlights the importance of identifying strategies that reduce the uncertainties.
One of these strategies, which directly applies to my social venture is running partial experiments. The article states that "partial experiments when a known unknown is involved and the value and cost of obtaining information can be quantified."
A few of my unknowns are:
1. Blend of coffee or type of chocolate to provide through the Friend a Farmer Fair Trade Cart
2. Maximum willingness to pay per cup of coffee or tray of chocolate
3. Whether or not students can "taste" the difference between conventional and fair trade
A partial experiment I could run to reduce these uncertainties would be to:
Table in front of Doherty Hall with two blends of coffee. La Prima has already offered to provide me with Colombian fair trade coffee and conventional fair trade coffee. I could keep the containers unlabeled and provide a brief questionnaire to students. I could also alter the prices to measure maximum willingness to pay.
The reason I would take this article with a grain of salt however, lies in the fact that it describes the payout of most new ventures as bi-modal: these ventures "create significant value if they succeed but are worth little if they fail" This seems very cut and dry. Even if these ventures fail, they may actually be worth a lot. This reasoning stems from my experience working in international development and the best example I can think of is related to successful knowledge management - communities will note failures and lessons learned of social ventures that sustain livelihoods and conserve the environment. If an initiative to create a community based biogas plant failed, what's worth alot is knowing why it failed and providing strategies for other communities to extract the lessons learned to develop a more efficient biogas plant that would better serve its needs.
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