[box]A Quick Recap:
Eight talented university students were chosen this year to participate in Students for Social Impact 2016 (SSIM), which is an international exchange program with students from Canada and the UK. They each have an idea for a social venture that addresses a local problem or global challenge. The first stop of the SSIM adventure was the Pond Deshpande Centre in Fredericton, New Brunswick. The amazing team at the Pond Deshpande Centre helped the students get to know each other, developed a peer learning network, reviewed the New Brunswick social entrepreneurial ecosystem, gave training on the business model canvas, and brought the students to local social enterprises such as The Ville, The Abbey Cafe, and Isaac’s Way. The students then took a bus down to the 5th Annual Deshpande Symposium in Lowell, Massachusetts. The timing was fortuitous as the conference was piloting their first student track. In all, 50 students from around the world were involved. The SSIM group also visited prestigious start-up incubators at MIT and Harvard as well as stopped in to see established social ventures such as Catie’s Closet and Mill City Grows.
The students are currently spending 10 weeks on-site working overseas at a social enterprise relevant to their social venture idea and refining their social venture business plans. They will be reconvening with other social impact leaders to share their learnings from the summer. The students will end off the opportunity by pitching their social venture business plan for the chance to win $10,000 towards the development of their social enterprise. [/box]
Pond-Desphande: The Appetizer
The Trico Charitable Foundation was honoured to partner with the British Council & RECODE on this initiative and joined the SSIM learning trip. While the focus was on helping the student social entrepreneurs with their ventures, we gained many amazing insights that we would like to share:
Don’t wait for permission to start your own venture, just do it! You have a support system that can help you.- Don’t wait until you are out of school to start a social venture.
- Working in a silo will never solve a problem created by a system (it takes a system to break a system).
- When asking for something, know exactly what you want and know what you need.
- To start, you don’t need a bazillion people, you need 12 committed individuals.
- Have a healthy attitude towards failure. The beauty and benefits of failure- check out J.K. Rowling’s video on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EKCgXUFobs
- View networking as being about curiosity- what can we learn from other people?
- Know when to cut your losses & move on.
- Focus on your key assumptions (what you need to be true for your idea to work).
- Success is based on if YOU solve the customer’s problem. NOT building features.
- Don’t sell what you make. Make what you sell.
- You should know your competitors inside and out.
- The amazing social venture the Ville was built on “barter and Kickstarter”.
- How can your articulate your problem so that people can relate?
- We try to fail quietly, but you gain more supports if you are vocal about it.
- Networking is actually about what you can offer to others.
- When you begin proving your concept people will start to come out of the woodwork, and then you need to learn how to say ‘no’.
- “This mess is interconnected”-student social entrepreneur talking wicked problems/system change.
Deshpande Symposium: The Main Course
- Every student should be an entrepreneurial student.
- Society has painted these images and made up these “stars” and “overnight success” but in reality, you do need a great team.
- Make sure you have a Board of Directors/Mentors- group of individuals who have industry specific knowledge
- There are no hard & fast rules
- Heard a lot this week that culture is driven by a leader. But if something only comes from your leader it’s not culture, it’s following orders
- Don’t need to call yourself a social entrepreneur, just as long as you are using markets to solve a social problem
- 1 challenge overheard from a student: trying to get more like-minded people in the social enterprise arena
Twitter board at the Desphande Symposium - Advice from a student:”There are students that are recognizable as social enterprise champions and should be put in place as a leader”
- Hold our assumptions lightly.
- 1 student “hack” shared: tap into your alumni network and other entrepreneurs can help your venture greatly
- Key sign of a good startup entrepreneur: are they open to knowing what they don’t know?
- Innovation happens when ripe seeds meet fertile ground
- You are constantly having to shift your paradigms with the different experiences you have
- Post-secondary institutions need to provide co-curricular activities that allow students to dip their toe in entrepreneurship to see if there is a fit.
- “We are very much a generation who values an economy of experiences”- student discussing the Millennial Dream, see the video here: http://fya.tv/movement/themillennialdream/
SSIM Recap: The Dessert
After taking about a month to digest the wisdom of the practitioners, students, and leaders in social enterprise alike, we are grateful to have been a part of these conversations. What puts the cherry on top of all of this is the SSIM group is attempting to maintain that discussion and share their social entrepreneurial insights. If you are social entrepreneur in Canada or the UK and want to connect with the group, please join the Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1539991066308601/
We are excited to join the SSIM group once again at the end of August in Toronto, Ontario to hear what they have learned from their internships and observe the pitch competition. Good luck to our eight remarkable participants!
