Social Enterprise Conference

On Sunday, I traveled to Boston to serve as a judge for Harvard Business School’s Pitch for Change competition that took place at the social enterprise conference hosted by the students at HBS. As it turns out, the contest was pretty fun.

Our day started with 24 student teams giving our panel of judges 30 second elevator pitches about their high impact, entrepreneurial ideas. From these 24 ideas, we whittled the group down to 7 finalists who would give a longer 2 minute presentation. We came to our seven, but only after debating the 20+ great ideas.

Interestingly enough, in many cases we were forced to eliminate teams because we were left wondering, “What does that business do?” Thirty seconds is not a lot of time and I’m sure those who have given an impromptu elevator pitch have reflected on what “coulda” or “shoulda” been relayed. The best contestants were those who were able to state a social problem and then tell us what business idea they would create to solve that problem. In many ways, the contest was all about speaking skills.

At times, I felt like I was participating in a pop-reality program for social entrepreneurs. But when the smoke cleared, we awarded a win, place, and show to three great student ideas. Third place went to an interesting program that delivers humanitarian aid through the front line troops to people in Iraq and other war torn regions. Second place went to an innovative idea that hopes to prevent counterfeit pharmaceuticals from reaching the marketplace in the developing world. And, first place went to an idealistic car company designing light weight carbon based chassis, and then distributing them through a locally run supply chain, hoping to create more local jobs and domestic car production while reducing carbon emissions. Whoa.

After judging finished, I was able to poke around and sat in on a great discussion about “top-down” versus “bottom-up” approaches to starting social enterprises. There were some good nuggets that I took away from that session.

All in all, a great conference. Congrats go out to the students who organized the whole thing.

p.s. Weather in Boston was cold! Wind chill was negative 9 degrees Fahrenheit when I left. And, I forgot my winter coat in sunny California.