Sneha Sheth, a Haas second-year MBA student, may not have won any of the largest prizes in the GSVC finals, but she certainly didn’t come home empty handed. As a GSVC finalist, she was awarded $1,000. But what she brought back from the experience was more important than the money. “It was a great experience, and what I liked the most about it was the incredible amount of feedback we got throughout the process,” she says. Together with Sindhuja Jeyabal, a student at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, Sheth’s venture is a mobile platform called Dost, designed to help mothers in impoverished economies break the cycle of illiteracy. Dost, which means friend in Hindi, sends mothers pre-recorded voice messages with learning activities and child development exercises they can perform with their young children.
“Education—especially low-cost private education—is just blowing up in developing countries,” Sheth says. “You can see that parents are frustrated by the low quality of many existing educational options and yet they know that education is the key to changing the trajectory of their children’s lives.” Two weeks into a pilot of Dost this past summer in Dharavi, one of Mumbai’s largest slums, more than 100 women had begun using the platform. At the conclusion of the pilot, all participants said they wanted to continue to use it and 90 percent said they would be willing to pay for it, Sneth says.
Like Dost, several of the other GSVC finalists this year had an education focus. In addition to the winning Blitab, others included vChalk, a Bangalore, India‒based startup offering remedial education in mathematics and English to first-generation learners; Cameroon-based Kwiizibox, which provides access to millions of articles, videos, TED talks and a specialized medical database via a credit-card-sized device that doesn’t require an Internet connection; and Otismo, a free mobile education smartphone app for children with autism from a team based in Turkey.
Beyond education, sustainability, healthcare and community development were primary points of focus for several GSVC teams this year. “Another great thing about GSVC is that it is so heterogeneous,” Sneth says. “It’s very different than most other business school competitions, and it draws teams working on very different things.”
Cameron Scherer, a first-year MBA student at Haas who helps run GSVC, concurs. “Just by the nature of our being a social impact competition, you do get a lot of companies that might not working on things as shiny or as sexy as the cool, new app that makes it through the more traditional business competitions—but they may be more important, especially in certain regions,” she says.
Scherer, who has a background in international nonprofit work, was drawn to Haas in part because of its involvement in things like the GSVC. “In my year here I have come to appreciate the role of entrepreneurship in developing countries and transitioning companies,” she says. “I get really excited about figuring out new ways of fostering entrepreneurship in these communities. I think it is so much better for economic growth than foreign companies coming in and imposing their products and services.” Her participation with GSVC has been a great way for her to gain exposure to that kind of thinking and leaders in the field, both current and future, she says.
“It also just builds this really incredible community,” she says of the global business competition. “When you go to the global finals you really see it in person—how quickly people bond and how supportive people are.”
Though its prize money is relatively modest, GSVC still draws strong teams from top schools, she notes. “You get people who enter the competition for reasons that are not strictly financial,” she says. “They want a place to meet leaders in their field, practice and hone their pitch and business model and meet like-minded people. I didn’t really grasp the full extent of that until I was there.”
As one of four GSVC student fellows, Scherer is tasked with examining the competition strategically and making recommendations for the future. She and another classmate are working now on expanding the GSVC partner network, examining which current partners are providing value and which aren’t, where there might be gaps in coverage and exactly what is required of partners. They are also evaluating community organizations like local accelerators that could serve as partners in addition to universities. “That way we can really plug it into the social entrepreneurship ecosystem,” she says.
Holding the GSVC finals outside of Berkeley met with wide-spread appreciation, Scherer notes, but financial and logistical constraints will limit where or how often that can happen going forward. It was also really exciting to see what GSCV could look like when it is imagined by someone else,” she says. “Thammasat Business School had a way of doing things that we never would of thought of. We are all very hopeful and very committed to continuing to hold GSVC elsewhere in the future,” she says.
From healthcare to education to supply chain logistics, MBA students are tackling thorny issues and coming up with prize-winning solutions. Here’s to the business plan competitions at HBS, Wharton, Haas and elsewhere that fuel the creative juices—and to the companies those ideas will grow into and the problems they may solve.
