Innovation Night!

A social enterprise is a business model that solves a social problem while still profiting. My group (Ingrid Pekala, Lily Picotte, and Mattie Dickinson), created a product named EcoBags. Our mission statement is, “EcoBags reduces trash pollution in the ocean by producing reusable bags out of repurposed plastics while also providing job opportunities for the unemployed population of Bali” (quote taken from our final presentation). We chose this business model because we all care about our environment and want to work towards stopping the 6th Mass Extinction. One of the “P’s” in the term “HIPPO” stands for pollution. Our main goal is to majorly cut down on water pollution by using trash collected from the ocean to produce our reusable bags.

I arrived at the second floor of the fieldhouse around 5:35, 10 minutes before Gregor told us to arrive. I was feeling nervous but excited to show off the product of our hard work. When the rest of my classmates started to arrive, my nerves were eased a bit. Our table looked very professional with our detailed trifold and prototype EcoBags. Around 6:00 visitors started to arrive at the fieldhouse to look at everyone’s work. The second-floor lobby started to get crowded with fellow students, faculty members, and some family members. The first person to come to my group’s table was a parent who asked us to pitch our business to him, he asked critical questions about the details of the production of our bags. This question was very helpful because we ended up changing our slideshow and part of the presentation minutes before we had to present in front of the crowd! We had originally planned for the production of our bags to take 2 hours for the employees to melt the plastic and sew it into a bag. The parent questioned why we don’t have a machine that could shorten this process to only 30 minutes. We thought about this for a bit then took the advice. We were all very thankful that he had given us this advice because it ended up being something that we got praised for by other people that came to learn about our business.

After standing around our table and talking to people individually about our enterprise, around 6:30 it was time to funnel into a classroom for all 4 groups in the class to present. Gregor brought in a special guest, Katie Bunten-Wamaru to watch our presentations and give us feedback. Katie is the CEO of the African Visionary Fund. Here is a snippet about what they do taken from the African Visionary Fund Linkedin page, “The African Visionary Fund is a pooled grantmaking mechanism that channels unrestricted funding to high-impact African social changemakers, transforming development across the continent while simultaneously tackling inequities, injustices and power imbalances in grantmaking” We were all so excited and grateful to have Katie here to help us with our projects! The first group to present was HardWood, this group consisted of Jon, Finn, Will, and Willem. Next up was the Sleep OFTs, the group was Ian, Connor, and Nick. Lastly, before our presentation was Bang’N Metal, this group was Cole, Liric, Carter, and Ex. Seeing my classmates present made me even more anxious (in an excited and nervous way) to give our presentation. When we got up there my nerves went away and our group killed the presentation! Katie’s feedback to us was very interesting. I remember her saying “I think that you guys should consider marketing your bags more towards tourists so you can sell them in Bali rather than shipping them overseas”. I really liked that idea and wish that the class went more than only one term so that we could explore this concept more.