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April 2011

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Headlines:


Teams from UC Berkeley/Stanford, MIT and Korea Claim Top Prizes at the 2011 Global Social Venture Competition

UM Celebrates Innovation at UC Berkeley in Support of Bplan

 

Berkeley-Haas Participates In New Orleans Entrepreneur Week


Upcoming Events:   


Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series:
Venture and Angel Financing: A Panel of Perspectives
Tuesday, April 19, 2011

 


Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum:
13th Annual UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition Finalist Presentations and Awards Ceremony
Thursday, April 28, 2011



Venture Capital Executive Program
May 16-20, 2011


Teams from UC Berkeley/Stanford, MIT and Korea Claim Top Prizes at the 2011 Global Social Venture Competition

 

[videos from the competition and conference are now available]

The Lester Center just hosted the Global Finals for the 2011 Global Social Venture Competition and 15 finalist teams from around the world came to the Berkeley-Haas campus to present innovative, market-based solutions to pressing social issues, such as access to clean water, sanitation, and reforestation. It takes courage to start any venture, but it takes particular passion and commitment to launch a venture that serves the bottom of the world’s economic pyramid and commits to measuring and assessing the positive social value generated by the business. The thoughtful solutions, rigorous analysis, and passionate pitches shared by the finalists were truly inspiring for everyone in attendance, either in person or via webcast. To watch the presentation videos, click here. The businesses represented at the Global Finals all stand to scale up substantially, become financially sustainable, and generate positive social and environmental benefits through their core business operations.

GSVC

What’s more, GSVC has catalyzed that future success.  As one of the aspiring entrepreneurs from the iziWasha team mentioned, “…the serendipity effect was in full force during the Global Finals.”  From the opportunity to get feedback from true leaders in the social enterprise field who served as judges, to connecting with a range of investors and a network of like-minded entrepreneurs, finalist teams walked away with many new resources for their ventures. 

 

GSVC Winners


GSVC 2011 Champion NextDrop accepts their $25,000 top prize from
student co-chairs Brian Busch (far left) and Brittany Hume (far right).


This year, GSVC received roughly 850 entries worldwide.  Thus the Global Finalists rose to the top of the largest and most competitive competition in GSVC’s history.   The high quality of this year’s entrants showed in the range and potential of the plans and the judges had the difficult task to pick just a handful of winners.  The grand prize winner, NextDrop (UC Berkeley and Stanford University) has developed a mobile platform and web interface that prevents community members, particularly women, in Indian cities from wasting hours each day waiting for water to arrive via truck or communal tap.  Besides an innovative use of technology, the team exhibited true determination to launch their business: they competed in GSVC last year, took some critical feedback to heart, continued to iterate and develop their field pilots, and ultimately returned this year to win. 

GSVC Judges   SIA Winners

The expert judging panel gives feedback to one of the global finalists.		  
Sanergy, a team from MIT that focused on sanitation facilities and services in the slums of Nairobi, went home with the top SIA prize and the second place blended value prize.


Close behind them in second and third place were the teams from Sanergy (MIT Sloan School of Management), who also took the Social Impact Assessment prize, and TreePlanet (Handong University, Korea).  Sanergy has developed a robust model to improve sanitation facilities and services in the slums of Kenya, providing enormous health benefits to users and producing both electricity and fertilizer from the waste they collect.  Finally, TreePlanet’s mobile game encourages users to care for a virtual tree and rewards “winners” by planting real trees in deforested regions in Indonesia. The app holds the potential to leverage the millions who play video games in developed countries to promote reforestation and other good causes effortlessly. 

 

GSVC Team


2011 GSVC student organizing team members pose with faculty and staff advisors
from the Lester Center: Executive Director Andre Marquis (top row, center),
Senior Fellow and Lecturer John Danner (bottom row, second from right),
and Senior Program Manager Jill Erbland (top row, second from left).


The Berkeley-Haas GSVC team would like to congratulate all the Global Finalist teams and thank all of our partner schools, mentors, judges, financial sponsors, and student organizers who made this year’s competition possible.  For more details, visit: http://www.gsvc.org/.


 

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UM Celebrates Innovation at UC Berkeley in Support of Bplan



On Wednesday, April 13th UM San Francisco will host the second annual “A Benefit for Innovation” dinner at the Clark Kerr campus at UC Berkeley.  For the second year in a row, the San Francisco office of the global media and advertising firm is partnering with the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition (Bplan) and the Lester Center to highlight new media innovation coming out of UC Berkeley and to raise necessary funds to support competing teams.  Over 150 people are expected to attend, including event sponsors from Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, MTV, Pandora and others, leading Bay Area marketers, UC Berkeley entrepreneurs in new media, Haas student leaders, and members of the UM and Bplan teams.


            bplan


The spirit of innovation is stronger than ever at UC Berkeley.  Over 200 teams of UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco entrepreneurs submitted their ideas to this year’s Competition, a 40% increase over last year’s record total.  Thirty-seven of these teams were selected to compete in the Semi-Final round on Tuesday, April 26th, and they have been working diligently with their assigned mentors in preparation for that big event.  Last Tuesday, April 5th, Semi-Finalists gathered at the Faculty Club for the second annual Launchpad event.  Teams met with venture capitalists and legal professionals in order to refine their business plans and investor pitch presentations.  By all accounts, the event was a tremendous success.  Martin Kan, Director at SVB Capital, said on his way out, “Tonight was great.  Meeting great new teams is my favorite part of this job.”  As one team put it, the night only had one downside – “not enough time! We could have talked for two more hours!”


Benefit for Innovation   Universal-McCann


UM’s “A Benefit for Innovation” represents the next step in the process for those Bplan teams in the new media space.  The reception and dinner will feature a keynote speech by David Pescovitz, Research Director with the Institute for the Future and pitches from five of this year’s IT & Web Bplan Semi-Finalist teams.  CheckEt, a mobile shopping platform, Crumbs, a location-based message service, FoodEngine, a restaurant dish recommendation service, Picturesque, a mobile advertising company, and The Social Catalyst, a new online marketing platform, will each pitch their idea and what they believe the future will look like.  All attendees are excited to hear these ideas and to celebrate the legacy and future of innovation at UC Berkeley.



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Berkeley-Haas Participates In New Orleans Entrepreneur Week



Eight Berkeley-Haas MBA students ventured to Louisiana over spring break in support of New Orleans Entrepreneur Week. Masha Lisak (MBA 12), Sue Young (MBA 12), Joe Wadcan (MBA 12), Iris Shim (MBA 12), Sunil Sharma (EWMBA 12), Rama Kolappan (EWMBA 12), Roxan Saint-Hilaire (EWMBA 11), and Jamie Aaronson (EWMBA 13) were paired with a local startup. While many other students were off to the beaches, these MBA students were working full time in the Idea Village incubator located in downtown New Orleans. The team worked with Tulane Law Professor Elizabeth Townsend-Gard to consult on market segmentation, positioning and pricing for her start-up Durationator. 

NOLA Teams

        Berkeley-Haas and Durationator teams

New Orleans Entrepreneur Week, the hallmark annual festival of entrepreneurship in New Orleans, celebrates and supports the collaborative network of talent that has enabled the city to become a model for building and sustaining entrepreneurial eco-systems.

The week is the physical manifestation of the entrepreneurial movement that has transformed and strengthened New Orleans. For seven days, local and national MBA students, corporate partners and business, academic and policy thought leaders convene in New Orleans for one-on-one consulting with local entrepreneurs, networking, pitch sessions and dialogue. Other MBA students came from the University of Chicago, Stanford, Cornell, Tulane, Loyola, and Kellogg. In addition, corporate sponsors included Google, Salesforce.com, and Cisco.

NOEW   Idea Village


The team enjoyed long work days, even longer nights out, and inspirational lectures by Tulane President Scott Cowen, famous basketball player Bill Walton and TPG Capital founder Jim Coulter. The 2011 New Orleans Entrepreneur Week was a resounding success, with a finale dinner at James Carville’s house. The Berkeley-Haas team had a tremendous experience and hopes that a group of Berkeley-Haas MBAs will participate again next year.

 


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