Standing on a table to demonstrate the right way carry yourself while giving a business pitch, Henrik Scheel, CEO of The Startup Experience, explained presentation techniques during an event last Friday sponsored by the Rockefeller Center. A two-day event last weekend called “The Startup Experience Workshop” urged students to devise a sustainable solution for a social problem.
Emphasizing the social aspect of entrepreneurship at the event was based in market demand for socially oriented businesses, new venture incubators programs director Jamie Coughlin said.
Scheel said in an interview that passion to resolve a social problem can combine with the right business model to be financially successful.
“In order to create a sustainable change and have a real impact in the world, you also do need to have a strong revenue model behind whatever initiative you are trying to start,” he said.
Preceding the workshop was a panel discussion on Thursday called “Using an Entreprenueurial Mindset to Make Social Impact.” The evening’s three panelists were Grace Teo, who founded Open Style Lab, Coughlin and Scheel. They shared their thoughts on social entrepreneurship as well as their experiences with startups. The panel discussion, Coughlin said, aimed to help students think about the concept of social entrepreneurship by providing examples of real startup experiences.
About 50 students who attended the panel, and several students interviewed said they were already involved in their own startup projects.
Tucker Oddleifson ’16, a member of Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineering, said he thought the skills brought up in discussion could be applied to his group’s projects.
Willie Hirschfeld ’14, who is part of the Paganucci Fellows Program at the Tuck School of Business which stresses experiential learning and social entrepreneurship, said that he was glad that the panel emphasized that improving the world can profitable.
“They don’t have to be mutually exclusive,” he said.
At the weekend workshop, students worked in groups analyzed customers’ needs through random street interviews from which they identified a social problem to change.
These problems ranged from organizing carpools for low-income workers to providing fresh food to parents in an urban setting who lacked disposable income to travel.
Each team then composed a business model that included a revenue and cost of the model and potential partnerships with other business.
The groups then reached out to customers and carried out market surveys to test their ideas, finally pitching their ideas for models to the judges.
Victoria Li ’16 said she learned the need for brainstorming and reviewing initial ideas before beginning to develop a business model.
Three other participants of the workshop — Kayla Wade ’16, Oddleifson and Walker Sales ’16 — said that the workshop helped familiarize them with steps involved in generating ideas.
Sales said he learned the importance of having a flexible attitude and being willing to change direction in case an initial idea or model does not unfold as expected.
The Rockefeller Center wanted to teach students that “innovation can be learned”, said the Rockefeller Center’s design and entrepreneurship officer Thanh Nguyen.
Coughlin said that he hoped to expose the students to the environment and the process of social entrepreneurship through this weekend’s workshop.
“I do think entrepreneurship in broad sense is a skill set, is a philosophy, a way of looking and identifying a problem and coming up with solutions,” he said.
The weekend is a “tool kit” to “build a solution to learn to solve these problems, Coughlin said.
The event took place at the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network Innovation Center and the Rockefeller Center.
It was cosponsored by the Office of the President, the Rockefeller Center, Collis Center for Student Involvement, Dartmouth Athletics, the Hopkins Center for the Arts, the Office of Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer and the Office of Pluralism and Leadership.
