HBS Business Plan Contest Introduces Social Enterprise Track
Social Enterprise Newsletter, Fall 2001
The HBS Business Plan Contest aims to educate students in the process of creating and evaluating new business ventures, while harnessing the unique resources that HBS offers. For the first time since its start in 1996, the contest introduced a separate Social Enterprise Track, which created a venue for students interested in developing plans for social-purpose ventures. Of the 41 teams competing in the business plan contest this year, 11 submitted nonprofit and for-profit plans with social agendas, a number that exceeded organizers' expectations.
Dean Kim Clark (center) with Low Cost Eyeglasses team; (left to right) Marcel Acosta, Ashley Nagargee, Naomi Weinberg, and Neil Houghton.
"Social enterprise plans have entered the business plan contest in the past and done quite well," notes Professor Allen Grossman, the track's faculty organizer. "However, this new track enabled teams to be judged based on criteria more specific to social enterprise and to receive more focused feedback on areas like social return on investment and performance measurement." The judging criteria were essentially the same as for the Traditional Track, with one primary difference: determining the plan's ability to create social value. Panels composed of venture philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists who have been involved in social enterprise participated in the judging.
Entries in the Social Enterprise Track competed for a separate first prize of $10,000 and in-kind services, and the winners in both the Traditional and Social Enterprise Tracks were announced this past spring. Top-place social enterprise honors went to Low Cost Eyeglasses, which developed a scalable, low-cost, accessible solution to meet the needs of an estimated one billion people in the developing world.
The other three finalists were Modulo, the runner-up team, which will provide goods and services to meet the needs of the low-income housing market in Mexico; Mi Banco, a for-profit direct lender to low- and middle-income population segments in Mexico; and Tissue Transfer Alliance, a software application service provider specializing in the exchange of human allograft tissue for use in clinical transplantation.
The introduction of the Social Enterprise Track enlarged the circle of faculty and students involved in social enterprise. Faculty advisors from a broad range of departments at HBS, including Operations, Entrepreneurship, and International Economics, participated in the contest, with approximately one-third of them new to social enterprise projects. The majority of team members had not taken social enterprise courses, and several teams included students from other Harvard graduate schools, such as the Graduate School of Education and the Kennedy School of Government.
The Eyes Have It: The Winning Team
While vacationing in Peru in 1997, Neil Houghton (MBA '01) noticed how rarely he saw people in small villages wearing glasses and began wondering about a system that could distribute affordable eyeglasses in developing countries.
During Professor Stefan Thomke's second-year course, Managing Product Development, he focused on a product that would be inexpensive to produce and ship, yet could be prescribed, assembled, and fitted in the field by trained micro-entrepreneurs (owners of very small businesses in developing countries) rather than by optometrists or ophthalmologists.
Next, Houghton formed a team with the goal of entering Low Cost Eyeglasses in the business plan contest. The team's skills were varied: Houghton had worked in venture capital and consulting; Naomi Weinberg (MBA '01), whose father is an ophthalmologist, had a background in strategic planning; Ashley Magargee (MBA '01) had worked with micro-enterprises in Bangladesh through a field study with Grameen Bank; Marcel Acosta, a Loeb fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design, came to the team grounded in municipal planning; and Rachel Ross, the enterprise's first employee, had conducted field research in Nicaragua.
The team's advisors included Thomke, entrepreneurs, consultants, product designers, and ophthalmologists. The team is also working closely with Saul Griffith, a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab, to develop alternative eyeglass production technologies.
Weinberg credits the rigorous business plan contest for accelerating the early development of their company. Yet, she maintains that the skills they honed at HBS have sustained them through the various successes and stresses typical of a startup social enterprise. "We learned to analyze obstacles thoroughly and understand what forces are in play," states Weinberg. "With Low Cost Eyeglasses, we've surveyed a public health issue and are attacking it with a business solution that we feel is sustainable."
Houghton agrees. "Low Cost Eyeglasses is an enterprise, not a charity," he maintains. "We're developing a system that, with increasing usage and sales, will be inherently better funded because it's supported by the end user."
