Social Enterprise Field Study Program: Putting Skills to Work

The Social Enterprise Field Study Program offers second-year MBA students the opportunity to apply tools and techniques learned in the classroom to society's real-world challenges. Under faculty supervision, student teams present research and analysis supported by concrete findings and recommendations. Two recent HBS graduates describe their field study experiences.

David Shushan, MBA '05

Our field study project focused on a very specific issue: the need to make financial education more accessible and easily available to low-income individuals. Most people learn about money from their parents or pick it up along the way; the problem is that those who can least afford it are sometimes taken advantage of or get into trouble. Some people don't know what a good mortgage rate is or what APR means. It's a foreign language, and if you don't speak it you can't ask for directions.

Working on the field study reinforced many of the points I learned at HBS, such as how critical a distribution strategy is and how it is important to test a concept with small experiments before committing significant resources to anything.

-David Shushan, MBA '05

In our research on delivery techniques, we noticed a growing trend in video games that imitate life. Our idea was to create an interactive game that educates users on financial matters by allowing them to make decisions about issues such as savings and investment accounts, retirement funds, and whether to rent or own a home or buy or lease a car. In our work to determine distribution channels, we reached out to faith-based initiatives through the Doorways to Dreams (D2D) Fund, a nonprofit that increases access to financial services for low-income families that was started by our faculty advisor, HBS professor Peter Tufano. The military has also expressed interest—they'd like to find an effective new way to focus on financial education during basic training. We hope we can entice a company to develop a prototype if the carrot is a potential contract with the U.S. government. I first became interested in the issue of financial education in college, when I worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and looked at issues such as access to credit and examined fair lending policies. Working on the field study reinforced many of the points I learned at HBS, such as how critical a distribution strategy is and how it is important to test a concept with small experiments before committing significant resources to anything. Finally, it gave me an appreciation for the importance of partnerships in creating a business. In the long term, I want to devote most of my time to having a broad impact in this area, whether working as a government official, becoming involved in a nonprofit, or heading up a lobbying organization.

Bhakti Mirchandani, MBA '05

I worked on the Global Microentrepreneurship Awards (GMA), a field study project that involved the recruitment and coordination of more than 60 development and microfinance professionals and graduate students. We collaborated with the United Nations Capital Development Fund in conjunction with the UN's International Year of Microcredit to create a competition for microentrepreneurs that would recognize business owners for their contributions to their families and communities.

The field study expanded my risk tolerance.

-Bhakti Mirchandani, MBA '05

The idea for the field study came about when a former colleague at Women's World Banking, now at the United Nations, asked me to coordinate stock exchanges worldwide to have microfinance clients ring the opening bells on the day of the launch of the International Year of Microcredit. I shared the idea with HBS senior lecturer Michael Chu. Likening the stock exchange coordination to "having an ad at the Super Bowl without having a product," he suggested that I leverage the coordination to publicize the power of microfinance. With the help of several classmates—most significantly, Deirdre Cooper, Mike Kerlin, and Mei Chee (all MBA '05)—this idea evolved into our field study project. The 2004 GMA involved competitions in nine countries, including Rwanda and Afghanistan, as well as the coordination of 14 stock exchanges, spanning cities from New York to Mumbai. Our goal was that the microentrepreneurs should remain front and center during the International Year of Microcredit.

The field study expanded my risk tolerance; soliciting past and future employers for funding before we had completed the design and implementation of the project entailed a huge reputational risk. I found that I was far more effective at building coalitions and mobilizing resources when speaking about the assets of the poor, such as their entrepreneurial spirit, rather than their needs. Also, HBS courses such as Managing Human Capital, The Moral Leader, and Power and Influence informed my actions and decisions. They helped me to evaluate the ethics of management issues and made me a more effective negotiator-a significant asset when it came time to finalize a $1.2 million deal to expand the GMA initiative to a three-way partnership in 32 countries with the United Nations and Citigroup. I am truly grateful for the support that the students, faculty, and staff at HBS gave to low-income entrepreneurs worldwide through this project.