Thanks for a great semester blog diez

Closing blog! I just wanted to write a quick thank you for an awesome semester! I certainly learned a lot about social ventures, feasibility plans, and the like. But I also learned a lot about myself throughout the process. I really appreciate you all allowing me to explore this topic and not judging me (at least not outwardly) throughout the process. I was scared to get up there an talk about race and my personal experiences but you all kept smiles on your faces so thank you. I appreciate you all!

Penny for your thoughts blog nueve

Finances and fun! Especially when you have NO idea where they are going to come from. It’d be cool if money grew on trees. My mom nipped that lesson in the bud real quick when I was younger, though.

Who is going to fund Race Place? I have avoided thinking about this for some time. The Pittsburgh Public School’s aren’t exactly rolling in the dough… Pittsburgh has a strong foundation community, but how likely is it that they will want to risk funding Race Place? Having the students pay is not viable option. Will I be able to get enough money from individual donors? Government grants? There are plenty of options, which is why I am going to draw on all of them…

Sources on income will be philanthropic grants, student fees, individual donations, and (potential) government grants.

I have been thinking about supplemental earned income for future years if Race Place expands. Ideally, I would like to develop a teacher-training seminar, which would bring in revenue. That would not happen until we worked out the kinks with the student class, as that is the priority. There is room for creative expansion that sticks with the mission of creating a safe place to talk about race. Another idea I have been tossing around is similar to the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network’s Safe Space Kit http://glsen.org/safespace. Race Place could develop a similar kit for discussions about race/identity and sell it to schools, universities, community centers, etc.

Somewhere between a known unknown and an unknown unknown blog ocho

I do not necessarily identify as a risk taker, but I would not say I am risk averse. I like to know how things are going to turn out. I’ve always had this need to know mentality. It is why I like learning so much. Deciding to pursue Race Place in this course was both in and out of character for me. It is a topic I feel passionate about and I pursue my interests, but I had NO idea what it should look like or even what an ideal end result was. 

Race Place is riddled with uncertainty and risk in almost every facet of its being. What should students learn? Who should the students be? Who do I hire? What makes someone qualified to talk about race? There are plenty of known unknowns, but what about the unknown unknowns? What am I not considering? This is such a contentious subject there must be plenty of things that haven’t crossed my mind.

This document: Searching for Necessity, did not answer all my known unknowns but it did help with some. It is really awesome resource and I apologize for posting this blog so late BUT if anyone does read this and wants to review successful ventures and review best practices here ya go! It uses examples from Pittsburgh so yay 412!

http://issuu.com/tomorrowtoday/docs/searching_book_issuu/1?e=0/8008844

The biggest personal risk I have identified throughout this process is checking my privilege at the door. I talked about this venture at a dinner with an educator who happened to be African American. She brought up the fact that I am indeed white. This is something I have been concerned about since day one. A privileged white girl talking to students about race, really? I’ve learned and been taught to check my privilege every day. I will learn from Race Place as much as the students who participate. That’s the point. This venture terrifies me, but that is why it is worthy of pursuit.

AquaponicsOS: The Measure of All Things

how many milliliters of water were needed for you to drink your daily breakfast juice? How many kWh? How many grams of CO2? Where was it produced? By Whom? How? Do you know? Do you even care?

The plain fact is that today it is virtually impossible to get hold of such data. At most we can feel good if we see a little green frog on the label right next the the bar code but that's about it. Knowing how many resources were needed to produce a product or service is beyond our current capabilities. Or is it?

We live in a complex economy (check Cesar Hidalgo's TED Talk). The products and services we give for granted are consequence of an intricate economic network that has been evolving for millennia. The coffee cup I'm currently enjoying while writing this blog needed coffee beans from some place closer to the equator. These, in turn, needed someone to buy the seeds, fertilizer, people to harvest, petrol to transport it, a logistic network to import it into the U.S., an industry that creates plastic cups, and so on. It is a network in the sense that each item needs other items to exist and everyone is connected, directly or indirectly. From the coffee bean farmer in Kenya to the software engineer in Mountain View, California.

As sensors keep falling in price it becomes feasible to start storing such information. It is the byproduct of the Internet of Things. For example, say we started recording the amount of water, kWh, kilograms of phosphate and fish food consumed to produce one kilogram of tomatoes. As discussed in previous blogs, one could safely say, although it might take some investment in sensor technology, it is possible to have such information. Imagine some farmer did the same with their wheat production and another did it with their dairy production. The same is true for flour production, storing each and every input that goes into their system. That is, what happens when each and every economic entity records the required inputs to produce one unit of production?

If we went to a restaurant and ordered for a pizza it would now be possible to know how many milliliters of water were required to produce it. This would be a simple consequence of joining the dots in the economic production. We know the pizza needed x grams of flour, y grams of cheese, z kwh of electricity, so much water and so on. In turn, one gram of flour needs so many grams of wheat , so many milliliters of water and so many kWh. One gram of wheat needed so much kWh and so much water. And so on, as long as you want to keep going (or so many hops in the economic network). To put it graphically, we would be constructing a tree.

Obviously, I wouldn't expect you to grab a calculator every time you go for pizza. However, if everyone followed a given protocol and made the information public an algorithm could construct the tree and give you the estimated number. If enough organizations started to do this, it would start becoming evident which ones would operate out of an open system. Some products would give you the exact number and others don't. In the same way "blood diamonds" where stigmatized by society, it would be nice to start demanding environmental accountability for the products we consume. Some companies, such as Patagonia, are starting to lead by example and take responsibility for the entire supply chain.

Additionally, if this system is in place, it would be nice to have something more intuitive. Instead of looking at the back label we could use our smartphone to tap into the economic graph and get back the information that we need. For example an interactive graph with color code for the level of resource utilization or just color coding if we are in a rush.

The point is that, given our current technological development, we should start demanding clear environmental accountability. Vertical Farms have the opportunity of delivering a product that knows exactly how much resources it is using. It can start building an organic informational economic network from the bottom up.

Tessa Roscoe Blog #10: The Epilogue

We made it! This final week's theme is entitled, "Ready, Set, Grow!", but I have found throughout my work this semester, my blog should more aptly be titled, "Know when to scale back!" After developing my business model, and discussing it's requirements with the company CEO, we've found that there would be less intensive and demanding ways of achieving the same mission goals. The company is not yet at the size to support the staffing and investment needed to launch the venture, but may reach that requirement in a few years. So the plans will sit on the proverbial shelves until the company can accommodate it. I believe they are still planning to launch a test/pilot run with a school in Brasil they have strong connections with in order to develop promotional material and encourage participation on their community website.

In the meantime, I met with the CEO to discuss other strategies that his company could implement now using the resources they currently have to achieve these same noble goals. His main goal when I first met with him at the start of the semester was "to get these kits into the schools and in front of students that would not otherwise have them." He identified specific schools in the area that he felt would be prime targets for this technology and wanted to raise the capital needed to subsidize the donation of the kits to these schools, in large enough quantities for teachers to actively engage them in their classrooms. We discussed his current purchasing procedures for customers and the extent of donations received from corporations and grants, but recognized the need to make whatever strategy applied self-sustaining over time; the company can not continually support what are often time and capital consuming fundraising efforts. My suggestions to him were as follows:

1. Currently, when schools (most often charter and magnet schools with flexible budgets) purchase kits, they receive a 10% discount off the retail price as an "educational discount". Allowing these schools to donate their 10% discount (they optionally select to waive their discount, knowing it will be deposited) to a savings account for underprivileged schools would create a self-sustaining source of funds to deploy kits to targeted schools.

2. Currently, many corporations make large donations to the company. Usually these lump sums of cash are used to deploy large batches of kits to schools that have not had the product before. However a problem arises in that the kits are often only used once, or sometimes never at all, because of school year constraints or staff turn-overs. Instead of soliciting a general donation from corporations, the company could offer a "Repair Pieces Sponsorship". This could be done on a more indirect level with the establishment of an endowment that all schools could apply for funding from; or a more direct venture could see the company matched with a specific school from which they receive a bill at the end of every school year for replacement pieces needed to use the kits again in the next school year.

3. Currently, obtaining sufficient arts and crafts supplies to use with the kits can be a deterrent for schools and teachers. Partnering with arts and crafts supply stores to provide a 10-20% discount to teachers/schools showing a company purchase receipt or voucher would help reduce this barrier to adoption and continuation of the program.

4 At present, soliciting participation from teachers in pre-training activities can be a big challenge. Partnering with a specific university or school district to provide continuing education credits to teachers undergoing company training sessions would significantly boost enrollment and participation among all ages and subjects of teachers.

These 4 strategies will allow the company to achieve it's goals of finding sustaining sources of funding to supply disadvantaged schools with kits. These steps will require some investment of time and presently held resources to be completed, but are not out of reach of current capabilities and will be significantly less demanding than launching the entire exchange venture. John Wooden once said, "Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be." These options are the right choice for this company. While some may view this closure of the project as disappointing, I actually found it refreshing. Often times, entrepreneurs get carried away in the 'magic of the venture' , consuming significant resources for little output. I felt this project was an exercise in frugal engineering and design thinking, and built upon my experiences with education and innovative technologies in a unique way. Working for my client was very rewarding and I felt like we both received a lot out of our professional relationship. And there is not much more you can ask for out of a 'failed' venture than that!

In closing, I will reference a resource that has three tips that I think helped me develop this epilogue of options, and may prove useful to any other entrepreneurs reconsidering their path forward. It is entitled, "What Surviving a Failed Venture Taught me About Preparing for Abrupt Change"
 (http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241798). The advice is timely for the conclusion of this class and the stage that many of our classmates may be in and I hope they all heed this simple advice. Best of luck Everyone!

Bonnie Gloris: Generating “Effective Demand”

This week’s topic is Ready, Set, Go (and Grow)!: Launching and Growing a Social Venture. In the Nesta (the UK’s innovation foundation) report Making it Big: Strategies for Scaling Social Innovations, author Madeleine Gabriel states that “social innovations can be said to have scaled when their impact grows to match the level of need.”

That’s precisely the approach the iCraft Path team is taking with our venture. In our client presentation earlier this week, we proposed a multi-tiered model for iCraft Path, with each version building off the previous version, not replacing it. This technique for scaling the business will enable our client to gauge the public’s interest level on an ongoing basis, and to respond accordingly.

The first iteration we recommended for iCraft Path is to create an aggregator of existing resources, and work with existing providers to make their services more crafter-friendly. We think that our client is an excellent spokesperson for crafters, and that she could be very helpful in working with resource providers to make their programs more accessible to crafters. We recommend having the website exist separately from her original venture, I Made it! Market, to ensure that all regional crafters feel welcome, not only those currently associated with IMI!  Advertising fees from relevant companies could be utilized to offset the cost of creating and maintaining the site.

The second version of iCraft Path would build upon the first version, but also offer original content to members. Crafters are receptive to the idea of paying inclusive membership dues, as opposed to one-off fees. Our focus group discussions suggest that crafters are not willing to pay more than $100 for such a membership. Our client might consider offering individual consulting services as a resource. This version would rely on strategic partnerships with other organizations – for example, being a member of iCraft Path could entitle crafters to a discount at partnering organizations for classes or supply discounts. 

The final iteration of iCraft path, Version 3.0, incorporates shared space into the resource, including workspace, retail space, and community space. The financial investment and risk of a shared space is significant, so we feel this version of the venture should be approached with extreme caution, only once “effective demand” (as phrased by Gabriel) has been generated.

We know that creating sufficient demand for each eversion of iCraft Path will rely, to some extent, on effective marketing by our client. One thing our team has struggled with throughout this project is the idea of “need” vs. “want”. Do crafters truly need the service that iCraft Path proposes to provide? If they say they want our services, does that mean they will actually use them? 

I decided to look into how to approach this issue, through the article Need vs. Wants in Marketing. Based on Neil Kokemuller’s description of finding the “dominant buying motivation of a customer to present the most persuasive messages,” my inclination is to appeal to crafters’ emotional needs in marketing iCraft Path: the desire for financial independence, validation of talent, etc. could be taken into accounting in developing a marketing strategy.

Has anyone else run into this dilemma of need vs. want in developing their ventures? If so, how have you gone about resolving it?

Jackie Shimshoni: The Power of Intuition in Decision Making

Indecisiveness is worse than a mediocre decision

This line struck me in the article relating Marine corps thinking to decision-making in an organization.  As academics, the greatest fear is making a "bad" decision with relatively low levels of repercussions.  So to think about a situation in which lives literally depend on the decisions that are made, hearing that "fast" trumps "right" is powerful.  I was also fascinated by the way the article mentioned that decision-making could be taught, and it made me wish a class like that existed at Heinz.  It seems incredibly handy to break down the process of making a decision to the point that it can be done with increasingly accurate intuitive power.  

I looked up Gary Klein, the psychologist mentioned in the article, and found a great Fast Company article that went into more detail about his findings.  That article can be found here.  It discusses how accumulating a wealth of experiences increases the efficacy of decision-making because you learn what you are looking for.  Intuition, it argues, is different than gut feelings, and infinitely important in decision-making.  The article summarized it as: "intuition is really a matter of learning how to see — of looking for cues or patterns that ultimately show you what to do".  The image below summarizes the decision-making process that Klein suggests people make, and become faster at the more experiences they accumulate.

Image Source: C3Fire.org

In a way it is comforting because the article stresses the more expertise you build, the faster you can make decisions, which indicates that if one just presses on, eventually it will get easier.  The "bad" decision making that we fear, it turns out, is all a part of that process.  In another article, Klein states: “You can have 10 years of experience or one year of experience repeated 10 times.  It’s the people that reflect on what happened and what they learned and seek out new challenges that become the real experts. They can always tell you about the last bad decision they made because it is still needling them.”  So reflecting on what went right and what went wrong, being bothered by mistakes but still seeking them out, and generally being tenacious all seem core to becoming the quick and effective decision maker that can lead an enterprise, or really any organization.