Designing an Innovative Business Model with Dean Shi and Professor Ian Fisk

Fish in the Fields

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the two winning teams: Fish in the Fields showing their fish faces.

The Winter 2014 Scouts are hard at work creating business models for their ideal social enterprises.  Five groups created the next wave of socially conscious businesses with top to bottom sustainability in mind.

The Scouts started with a dream company of their own creation and turned them into a business model to present.  Each team presents the dream company of one member and the entire team completes a business model based on that company.

Going from an idea to a model in two days of Yuwei’s class was a true challenge that our scouts accepted with grace and executed with hard work. They utilized their bright minds by working together through the challenges of social entrepreneurship. Here are the teams:

Team A – Peregrine Impact Plus is a lean startup focused on enabling migrant laborers in India to become vocationally and financially trained.  Their business model establishes a connection between employees, and vocational and financial education to create stronger employees.

Team B – Frontier Data & Distribution is bridging the gap between social enterprises and their constituents by utilizing a business model based on data acquisition and analysis. Selling market data to social and corporate enterprises for Bottom of the Pyramid customers.

Team C – Fish in the Fields addresses the question of how to raise baitfish utilizing rice paddies. By focusing on environmental and social impact, they are on the forefront of sustainability by selling bait-fish grown in Northern California rice paddies to fish farmers in Mexico – creating an entirely organic supply chain.

Team D – Pense provides financial products and services to small shop owners in East Africa through banking and financial knowledge. It works with M-Pesa to facilitate capital flows and also provides sales data.

Team E – Power2thePeople sells renewable energy to rural communities and addresses this with small-scale solar development for the 1.2 billion people don’t have access to reliable energy.

Our Winners, Fish in the Fields and Pense, each received a bottle of California Pinot Noir and the admiration of their colleagues for outstanding business models. Congratulations to all scouts for pulling together such excellent and thorough models in such a short amount of time.

For live updates follow @fmscouts

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