Doing well by doing good

In the two weeks since my last column on the intersection between development policy and business, I have found newer and ever more fascinating enterprises defining and redefining the intersection between the two apparently disparate worlds of doing well and doing good. This past Saturday, women from all over the world attended the Intercollegiate Business Convention in Boston, hosted by Harvard University’s Women in Business. Although the conference featured the usual suspects in finance and consulting, the program demonstrated the paradigm shift in the industry’s attitude towards doing good. Where there was once a cursory mention of corporate social responsibility, there is now an entrepreneurial movement toward creating sustainable, environmentally oriented businesses. Companies no longer get away with a day or two of community service—instead, corporations are slowly incorporating social and civic responsibility into their very DNA.

Priya Haji, one of the keynote speakers, co-founded World of Good, which has partnered with eBay to create an online market for goods made by women entrepreneurs in developing countries. Previously, supply chains were so complex that a good produced in a developing country exchanged hands seven to eight times before it reached its customer, who, as a result, paid significantly more than the producers themselves received. By removing the middleman, the ingenious business model employed by World of Good connects entrepreneurs in developing countries directly with the customers and ensures that these entrepreneurs receive a far more reasonable fraction of the retail price. Haji spoke about how she travelled to India, Cambodia, and South Africa after college to study prospective supply markets and meet individual producers and nongovernmental organizations. In her travels, she developed an invaluable knowledge base and an understanding of her suppliers. Initially, she and her co-founder, Siddharth Sanghvi, had 10 clients for their goods—and then eBay came knocking. The World of Good Web site features their sellers and the NGOs they partner with to source their products, dramatically diminishing the distance between customer and producer.

This immediacy is old-school business in which the customer and producer have direct contact—the kind of business that took place before large and complex supply chains transformed the nature of consumer-producer interactions. There is nothing old-school, however, about the entrepreneurs entering and transforming the world of social enterprise. Haji is young, dynamic, and armed with a brilliant idea, and she is not the only one of her kind. Jessica O. Matthews is co-founder and business and finance director of the sOccket enterprise. She is also a senior at Harvard, majoring in social psychology and economics. Matthews, along with three classmates, created sOccket as a class final project, and, as she said at one of the panels, she was given start-up capital to market the product.

sOccket is, like many great business ideas, simple, adaptable, and infinitely useful. The product is a soccer ball that acts as a reservoir of energy and harnesses the energy expended while playing for small electrical applications, such as charging a cell phone. Regarding their progress in product development, Matthews said that 90 minutes of play currently produces 15 minutes of energy and that the company is working with researchers and engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to improve its productivity. The company has both for-profit and non-profit sector components. The co-founders are involved in talks with sporting goods giants Adidas and Puma and are working with Parisian companies to launch an online campaign during the July 2010 Football World Cup. In addition, they work with Whizz-Kids, an NGO dedicated to providing life skills training and HIV/AIDS awareness through the universal language of soccer. By directing its efforts and strategy towards two different markets, sOccket is not just about charity—it is an efficient, profitable, and therefore sustainable enterprise.

This paradigm shift—from a separation between “doing good” and “doing well” to a symbiotic union of the two goals—is increasingly apparent throughout the industry. Albe Zakes works at Terracycle, Inc., a company founded by a Stanford alumnus that converts waste to eco-friendly, useful, and affordable products, such as backpacks. The company started an initiative in which it paid schools two cents for every empty Capri Sun or similar juice pack they collected. Approximately 100 schools signed up in the first hour, and 700 signed up in the first three days. Today, over 50,000 schools participate. “See, our success lies in the fact that he didn’t set out to do some grassroots campaign, he looked for a way to make a sustainable profit. Taking something that has zero apparent value and transforming it into something valuable—that’s good business,” Zakes said of Terracycle’s founder.

These are only some of the incredible young entrepreneurs in the business of saving the world, one idea at a time. The experiences of sOccket in particular made me wonder why there isn’t more entrepreneurial spirit on Columbia’s campus—it is certainly not for lack of talent, energy, or ideas. The University should take a cue from such success stories and encourage students through competitions, sponsorships, and opportunities for them to display their entrepreneurial talent. Engineering and economics classes should focus not only on theories and ideas, but on their translation into tangible ideas that inform real change.

Monica Varman is a Columbia College junior majoring in economics-mathematics and concentrating in sustainable development. She is a senior editor of Consilience and works on the Millennium Village Project. Green Piece runs alternate Tuesdays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com

Tags: Opinion, Monica Anjali Varman, entrepreneurship, sustainable development