Two different I School projects have been named finalists in the 2011 Global Social Venture Competition, competing with thirteen other projects from around the world for $45,000 in prizes.
The Global Social Venture Competition is the largest and oldest student-led business-plan competition; the competition supports the creation of real businesses that bring about positive social change in a sustainable manner. The competition was founded in 1999 at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, in partnership with six other business schools on four continents and three outreach partners.
Two different teams from the I School will be competing in the final round of the competition, to be held Thursday and Friday in Berkeley. Edumile.org uses peer-to-peer technology and micro-lending to assist students pursuing higher education in India. NextDrop addresses the challenge of unreliable piped water in developing countries by providing households with reliable, near real-time information about water arrival via the mobile phone infrastructure.
Both projects originated in the I School course Social Enterprise for International Development, taught by School of Information assistant professor Tapan Parikh — NextDrop in Fall 2009 and Edumile.org in Fall 2010. The course trains students to create social enterprises for rural developing regions, using information and communication technologies; it will be taught again in Fall 2011 as Information 287.
The NextDrop team includes second-year MIMS student Thejo Kote, in addition to graduate students from civil engineering, public policy, and business. The Edumile.org team includes second-year MIMS students Satish Polisetti and Sean Carey and first-year MIMS student Ankita Goyal, along with colleagues in business, finance, economics, and computer science.
Both teams competed with over forty other projects in the competition's west coast regional finals in March. NextDrop was one of two regional finalists in the "blended value" category, and Edumile.org was the west coast's only finalist in the "social impact" category. In the final round, these two projects will compete with teams from Burkina Faso, Thailand, South Africa, London, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Korea, and the United States.
The finalists will gather in Berkeley this week to present their projects; Friday's presentations will be live webcast here. The winners will be announced at an awards dinner on Friday evening.
