Alumni Newsletter September 2015
Competing to Change the World
This past March, fifth-year Western Economics and Business student Eric Huang travelled with his team of three other Western students to Boston for the 2015 Hult Prize Challenge regional finals. Their goal: convince a panel of successful entrepreneurs that they had the next great social business idea.
The Hult Prize Foundation, in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative, is an innovative start-up accelerator for young socially conscious entrepreneurs attending universities from around the world. The annual competition aims to launch the most compelling social business ideas that help solve important world problems while providing a modest return to investors. Winners of the competition receive 1 million US dollars in seed capital, as well as mentorship and advice from the international business community.
Over 20,000 teams answered the initial call for the 2015 competition. Eric’s team was one of only 250 to be invited to one of five regional competitions. While his team was not among the five regional finalists, Eric says it was still a tremendous learning experience…one which he hopes to build upon in this coming year’s competition.
This year’s Hult Prize challenge was to create a social enterprise to provide quality early childhood education by 2020 for 10 million children under age six in the world’s urban slums. Eric’s team of business, education and child psychology students came up with an innovative idea premised on a two-sided social enterprise. On the business side, their plan called for a web-store that would source products from local entrepreneurs and sell them abroad. Profits from these sales would fund operations on the education side, which would include day care services and early childhood education for children under age 6, parenting skill seminars for their mothers, and an effort to help mothers produce goods for sale in the project’s web-store. The urban slums of Kenya would be their first target community; however, the idea could be replicated elsewhere.
When asked what impressed him the most about the competition, Eric answered that it was realizing that he and his team could successfully compete with the best and brightest from around the world. His training at Western prepared him well for the event, especially, he says, his course in Economic Development, which taught him how to analyze economic and poverty indicators. More generally, he credited his economics courses for teaching him to “research efficiently and to ask the right questions” to tackle the challenges associated with providing early childhood education to millions of impoverished children across the globe. These skills will also be needed as he embarks on the new challenge of pursuing his M.Sc. in Data Analytics at Ivey in January.
Return to the Economics Alumni Newsletter on the web.
