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Social E-Challenge, Social E-Challenge
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Stanford University Showcases and Awards Innovative Social Enterprises
Six innovative new social enterprises presented their plans for how they want to change the world on Friday, May 29, 2009 at Stanford University in front of an audience of more than 50. As finalists in the Social E-Challenge, they competed for $50,000 in awards to help kickstart their ventures. The Social E-Challenge is one of the premier student-run social entrepreneurship business plan competitions in the world, and is organized by BASES, the student organization at Stanford dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship. There has been a surge of interest in recent years in social enterprises: ventures that take entrepreneurial principles from purely for-profit businesses and apply them towards tackling social problems. The Social E-Challenge supports these new types of ventures as well as sustainable non-profits.
This year over 110 entries applied in the competition with an executive summary, and over sixty social entrepreneurship thought leaders from around the United States helped select 17 teams to advance to the second round. These teams prepared business plans and presented their ideas to panels of accomplished judges. The top six teams (Driptech, OneBreath, Re:Motion Designs, Respira Design, SEE College Prep, and Sustainable Health Enterprises) advanced to the finals, and were among the best ideas ever seen in the Social E-Challenge. Not only do they have the potential of delivering significant social impact, many of them have already started pilot trials in their respective markets.
The distinguished panel of final round judges included Debra Dunn (Board of Directors Member, Skoll Foundation and Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford d.school), Matt Flannery (Co-Founder and CEO, Kiva), Dr. Don Francis (Executive Director, Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases), R. Paul Herman (CEO and Founder, HIP Investor), and George Scharffenberger (Advisor for International Development Policy and Practice, UC Berkeley).
In an unprecedented decision in Social E-Challenge history, the final round judges selected two teams from the extremely competitive pool as this year’s winners. Re:Motion Designs and Respira Design will receive $20,000 each to jumpstart their ventures. They have also been nominated as the Social E-Challenge representatives in the DFJ-Cisco Global Business Plan Competition, for the opportunity to receive a $250,000 investment from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and its partners. Please see below for more detailed information about each venture.
SEE College Prep, a student initiated grassroots approach for college test preparation, and Sustainable Health Enterprises, a nonprofit developing a market-based solution to manufacture and distribute affordable, high-quality, and environmentally-friendly sanitary pads tied for second place and will receive $4,000 each. Driptech, a low cost drip irrigation system that multiples farmers’ yields and conserves water, and OneBreath, an easily deployable ventilator for better pandemic preparedness, will receive $1,000 each for their participation in the final round.
Re:Motion Designs
Worldwide, a profound number of people lack mobility due to physical impairment. In India alone, it is estimated that over 10 million people suffer from locomotive disabilities. Trauma due to war or accidents, and diseases such as diabetes, result in a global rate in the hundreds of thousands of new lower-limb amputees each year. For the 2 million amputees in the US as well as other developed nations, modern assistive technology has re-mobilized lower limb amputees, but typically costs in the thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars. Re:Motion is a non-profit venture that provides high performance, extreme-affordability prosthetic components for developing world amputees. Our initial product, The JaipurKnee, is a polymer-based polycentric knee joint that can be manufactured for a cost less than $20 US. The JaipurKnee is currently in field trials in India and has been fitted on over 40 patients to date.
Respira Design
Asthma afflicts 200 million children worldwide. 70% of them live in the developing world, where they lack access to prompt, effective and affordable care, These children suffer frequent asthma attacks that lead to chronic disability and lifelong respiratory disease. Treatment for acute attacks is typically delivered in emergency rooms, where it is delayed and expensive. Respira Design produces and distributes a $1 device made from paper that extends the treatment of asthma into low-resource settings. This device improves the quality of care and saves the healthcare system hundreds of dollars each time it averts an emergency room visit. Respira Design has chosen Mexico as its initial target market to build on relationships developed during its two years of fieldwork in Mexican health clinics. The device has been validated in the laboratory and is currently undergoing clinical trials, with plans for a staged rollout throughout Mexico over the next five years.
BASES is made possible through the generous sponsorship of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Morgenthaler, New Enterprise Associates, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, Plug And Play Tech Center, Philips, and Northwest Venture Partners.
For more information, contact Silvia Loica-Mersa, co-Vice President of the Social E-Challenge at (949) 584-0548 or sociale@bases.stanford.edu.
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