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Global Social Venture Competition



GSVC

NEWS:
2011 GSVC Global Finals Winners Announced!

Videos from Global Finals and Ideas to Impact Conference, April 7-9

The Global Social Venture Competition [GSVC] is an innovative partnership between the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, Columbia Business School, London Business School, Indian School of Business, Thammasat University, Thailand, ESSEC Business School in France, the Social Enterprise Network in Korea, and Outreach Partners in Asia, Europe and the US. The competition aims to foster a new generation of business leaders that values the social as well as the profit potential of business. It achieves this goal by catalyzing and promoting for-profit and not-for-profit ventures that create and measure both social and financial goals.

Winning ventures have included a company that provides healthy meals to low-income schools, an alternative energy company, a manufacturer of stylish women’s apparel and accessories, a nonprofit charter school, an environmentally friendly manufacturing technology company, a microfinance enterprise focused on the developing world and a community-employment enterprise operating in rural and low-income urban areas.

Venture teams must include at least one current graduate business student, and all competing ventures must have been in operation for fewer than three years. Substantial cash awards are distributed to winning ventures each year.

For more information and specific rules, visit www.gsvc.org.

For information about the 2010 Global Social Venture Conference and Competition winners, click here. For information about previous years' competitions, click here.




GSVC 2011 Global Finals and Ideas to Impact Conference

Join us for the GSVC Global Finals and Awards Dinner on April 7 & 8!


Top teams from around the world will gather at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley on April 7 & 8 to compete for $45,000 in prizes. On Thursday, April 7, the Social Impact Assessment (SIA) Finalists will compete for the SIA Award, and on Friday, April 8, the Global Finalist teams will pitch their social ventures and engage in Q&A with a panel of expert judges. Both pitch sessions are free and open to the public, creating an invaluable opportunity for investors, entrepreneurs, students, and the broader social venture community to hear the latest innovations in the social venture space and meet the teams in person.

View the detailed schedule here.

Later that evening, join us at the Global Finals Awards Dinner to celebrate the culmination of the 2011 competition and crown this year's winning teams. Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development and Berkeley-Columbia MBA 04, will give the keynote address.  She is a four-time entrepreneur in the energy, education, and high-tech fields, and will share her thoughts on the critical role that social ventures play.

Register for the Awards Dinner here.


Ideas to Impact


Roll up your sleeves on Saturday, April 9 for the
Ideas to Impact Conference



Ideas to Impact (I2I) is a day for doing.  We invite you to join active and aspiring social entrepreneurs, double-bottom-line business leaders, and Global Social Venture Competition entrants to take ideas into action in one collaborative, hands-on event.  Featuring fast talks, demos, pitch sessions, and workshops, this is the conference for people pushing change.  Our keynote speaker, Ted London, is a leading expert on the intersection of business strategy and poverty alleviation.  He is a Senior Research Fellow at the William Davidson Institute, directing the Base of the Pyramid Initiative, and on the faculty at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

For more information visit the conference website.

Register for the conference here.



Schedule of Events – April 7-9, 2011


Thursday, April 7: Social Impact Assessment Finals Competition
Location: UC Berkeley Men’s Faculty Club, Seaborg Room
 
3:00-6:00 PM Presentations by SIA Finalists
Location: Seaborg Room
 
Friday, April 8: Global Finals Competition and Awards Dinner
Location: Haas School of Business/UC Berkeley
 
9:00 AM-4:30 PM Presentations by Global Finalists Teams
Location: Andersen Auditorium, Haas School
 
6:00-9:00 PM Reception, Dinner & Awards Ceremony
Location: International House, UC Berkeley
 
 
Saturday, April 9:  Conference – I2I: Ideas to Impact
Location:  Haas School of Business
 
8:00 AM – 5:30 PM For details, visit the conference website.
  Cocktail reception immediately following event.



SPONSORS

GSVC gives special thanks for our current 2011 sponsors:

Dow Intel
   
Center for Responsible Business MorrisonFoerster
   

NCIIA


The Helzel Family Foundation
   
Brightpath Deloitte


Donate to GSVC - We are 100% donor funded

Become a Sponsor - Develop your social innovation pipeline, shape the competition and get media impact by investing in GSVC. Contact us at sponsors@gsvc.org today!

Donate Individually - Your generous support will help strengthen the global community of innovative social entrepreneurs who are working to change the world. To make an individual donation to the GSVC, click here.


Stay Connected

Visit our website @ gsvc.org
Follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/gsvc
Join the GSVC community @ facebook





2010 Winners



FIRST PLACE – Grand Prize of $25,000


Re:Motion Designs
Stanford University, USA
Contact:  Joel Sadler, joel@remotiondesigns.org


With 80% of the world’s amputees living in developing countries, there is a profound need for low-cost lower limb prostheses for the developing world. Modern assistive technology has the potential to re-mobilize lower limb amputees, but at a cost typically in the thousands of dollars.  Re:Motion Designs is a for-benefit venture that provides high performance, extreme-affordability prosthetics for the 20 Million amputees in the developing world.  Our initial product, the JaipurKnee, is a polymer-based polycentric knee joint that can be manufactured for less than $20 USD, and has been featured by Time Magazine, CNN, BusinessWeek and Fast Company as a major innovation of 2009. Compared with existing low-cost prosthetic knee joints, the JaipurKnee provides a new class of stability and gait efficiency for above-knee amputees, and is currently in field trials in India with over 700 patients fitted to date. For more information visit www.remotiondesigns.org.


 

SECOND PLACE - $10,000


Ruma
Harvard Business School, USA
Contact: Aldi Haryopratomo, aldi@ruma.co.id


Of the 250 million people in Indonesia, 3/4 live below $2.5 a day, and 2/3 have mobile phones. Ninety percent of these users buy prepaid minutes instead of paying a monthly bill. Ruma sells a business-in-a-box that enables small entrepreneurs to sell prepaid minutes. We buy minutes at a discount from 10 telecom operators and store them in our server. When a customer buys minutes from our entrepreneur, we send the minutes electronically via SMS thereby reducing the need for a physical voucher. We worked with Grameen Foundation to develop this model, which is essentially the next evolution of the Grameen Phone.  As of March 2010, we’ve deployed a network of 2,000 entrepreneurs, $3,000 worth of minutes to 80,000 customers each day. Seventy percent of our entrepreneurs were below the poverty line when they joined; now 100% are profitable. We plan to launch a jobs market, micro-insurance and retail application using our prepaid minutes platform.



THIRD PLACE - $5,000


Bags of Hope
Guanghua School of Management – Peking University, China
Contact: Zhen Ghong, cindy.gongzhen@gmail.com


Our company is dedicated to promoting a program named Stacks of Straw, Bags of Hope. We create job opportunities for millions of rural women who are bound to the land in remote areas making very low income to support their families. We provide training for them to process straws to weave bags and promote the distinct local culture through bag design. In this way, we can also prevent tons of straws from being burnt as fertilizers, reducing significant CO2 emission. We plan to sell those straw bags at high-end supermarkets in major cities in China. 30% of our profit will be donated to schools in areas we have cooperation relationships to purchase books. We firmly believe if you give a man a job, you help him only for some time; if you offer a man better education, you help him for a lifetime.



SOCIAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT AWARD - $5,000


WE CARE Solar
Haas School of Business – UC Berkeley, USA
Contact:  Laura Stachel, laura@wecaresolar.com


WE CARE (Women’s Emergency Communication and Reliable Electricity) Solar is a social enterprise that saves lives of childbearing mothers and infants in developing regions by providing obstetric health facilities with solar power for lighting, mobile communication and essential medical devices. Pregnancy-related complications cause over 500,000 maternal deaths annually, primarily in Africa and South Asia. Life-saving obstetric care requires reliable lighting, communication and electricity. Approximately 300,000 health facilities worldwide lack this basic infrastructure. WE CARE Solar has developed and field-tested the Solar Suitcase, a user-friendly, portable, plug-and-play solar-electric system that ensures electricity, lighting, and communication for maternity care in low-resource settings.   In addition, WE CARE is leveraging and building local market-based capacity and partnerships to distribute, install and maintain these systems. The Solar Suitcase facilitates timely and effective emergency care and reduces maternal and infant morbidity and mortality, thus enhancing family productivity, strengthening health systems, and improving markets for renewable energy.




2010 Finalist Teams

 

2010 Global Finalists


Amandes, Prasetiya Mulya Business School, Indonesia

AYZH, Rural Technology Business Incubator, IIT, India

Bags of Hope, Guanghua School of Management – Peking University, China

C-Crete Technologies, MIT Sloan School of Management, USA

Freehap, Chulalongkorn and Thammasat Universities, Thailand

LoChlorine, Haas School of Business – UC Berkeley, USA

MAKANE, ESSEC Business School, France

Nest for All, Mines de Paris, France

Ruma, Harvard Business School, USA

Winduction, London Business School, UK

ReMotion Designs, Stanford University, USA


2010 SIA Finalists

Agrisolutions, Great Lakes Institute of Management, India

BLISS, MIT Sloan School of Management, USA

Puno, Ateneo de Manila Graduate School of Business, Philippines

Vitanutril, Reims Business School, France

WE CARE Solar, Haas School of Business – UC Berkeley, USA

 



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