Category: Classroom

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The Sustainable Innovation MBA Trade Show: Showcasing Innovation

This post was written by Seth Gillim ’18

On the last day of November, the students of The Sustainable Innovation MBA hosted their annual Business Model Trade Show in the bustling lobby of Kalkin Hall. Visitors toured booths, sampled products and learned about the creative enterprises students have been working on throughout Module 2. For the students, it was a great opportunity to hone their elevator pitch and get feedback for their business ideas from noted visitors like venture capitalist and UVM alum David Aronoff, a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners.

The Trade Show is the brainchild of professor Erik Monsen. His course, Crafting the Entrepreneurial Business Model, focuses on developing and assessing the viability of a business from the ground up. Students draw on their core MBA toolkit in finance, accounting, marketing and business strategy to dream up new, sustainable ventures that create value in innovative ways. The goal is to become more comfortable thinking entrepreneurially, as well as understand the inherent challenges and complexities of launching new ventures.

Many of the businesses focus on creating consumer goods that fill an unmet or underserved need in the marketplace. For instance, B3 is a consumer health company that offers simple, effective and environmentally friendly shampoo products made entirely from water, baking soda, and essential oils. Visitors to the trade show learned that the average shampoo contains more than 30 ingredients, many of which are known to cause adverse health and environmental effects. Another team of students with science and engineering backgrounds created Conscious Coffee Pods: small on the go servings of coffee in an algae-based pod that are shelf-stable, easily dissolved in water, and produce no packaging waste. Yet a third team created Flip Balm, an on the go algae-based sunscreen that attaches to a wristband made of recycled ocean plastic.

Other groups of students focused on using the for-profit model to deliver consumer services efficiently and equitably. A team of students founded Pathways, an organization that works to connect with place high school students in gap year programs around the world. In addition to placements, Pathways teaches critical life skills like cultural competency, work-life balance, focus and healthy risk-taking. Still another group have formed Tiny Bliss, a micro-community of Tiny Homes offering a unique rent-to-equity model where tenants have a portion of each month’s rent set aside and invested.  One of the biggest challenges facing millennials is they cannot set aside enough for a mortgage down payment due to the high cost of rent. Tiny Bliss’ flexible financial model seeks to solve this problem while offering fun, alternative and low-carbon living at the same time.

Other start-ups included a shared workspace venture, a location-based app that matches consumers with their social interests, and a novel building supply company that sources reclaimed materials like pallets and glass bottles for DIY construction projects.

The Business Models trade show is quintessential SIMBA: students’ imagination and entrepreneurial grit is on full display, as is their hard-nosed attention to financial cost models and real-world constraints and challenges of launching a start-up.

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Getting to Know the Class of 2018: Mark Mallory

Mark Mallory ’18 did his undergraduate work at UVM, earning a degree in community entrepreneurship with a minor in economics. After a period of travel, and gaining experience in sales and real estate management, Mark returned to his alma mater and The Sustainable Innovation MBA. He was interviewed by Isabel Russell, an undergraduate at UVM.

Why did you choose to attend The Sustainable Innovation MBA program?

I chose to attend the program because I want to expand my knowledge of business and sustainability and use that knowledge — and connections made through the program — to propel my career. I have high aspirations to be successful in the business world and make a lasting impact on society.

What has been your favorite part/element of the program thus far?

My favorite aspect of the program has been the collaborative and supportive environment from both the faculty and classmates. I also am enjoying the broad and in-depth curriculum that challenges us every day. I think that what we’re learning is going to very relevant and applicable in the current world and into the future.

What are three things someone considering the program should be aware of?

  1. The program moves quickly. You’ll need to be proactive and manage time well.
  2. The main difference from traditional MBAs is the emphasis on collaboration and teamwork (which I think is very relevant for the modern landscape).
  3. There is a ton of information to soak in. I would advise not to get ridiculously caught up in every little detail that is presented throughout all the courses in the program. Part of this year is to learn more about what interests you and to understand how to leverage the tools that The Sustainable Innovation MBA is giving to go and succeed in the real world. Getting stressed out over small details I think can potentially limit ones ability to maximize their time in the program.

How has The Sustainable Innovation MBA helped you?

The program is giving me the tools that I need to succeed in the business world. We are learning all of the foundations of business, but taking into account how it relates to the world today and how business will look in the future. The collaboration with students from a variety of backgrounds have given me many new perspectives, which I think is helping me grow as an individual and understand new ideas and possible solutions to problems. I have also gained much more insight about career opportunities through the connections I have made.

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Making Time for Reflection: Module 2 Comes to An End

This post was written by Greg Paylor ’18

The final two weeks of Module 2 have arrived! As have exams, the due dates of many individual assignments, and many team related deliverables. It’s an exciting time and the pressure dial has been cranked up a few notches. In an intensive MBA program such as this one, especially now, I find myself completing tasks and moving on to the next in rapid succession.

Finding time to both reflect on and celebrate successful team projects, or debrief on things that could have worked better, has often taken a backseat to other pressing needs.

One of my favorite assignments from this module came in our Leading for Sustainable Innovation class with Professor Kenneth De Roeck. We were asked to write two “Leadership Reflection” papers on past experiences we have had pertaining to leadership and motivation. Professor De Roeck would then use student responses (anonymously) in class to frame course concepts and organizational behavior theories.

At a very high level, some of the questions that we were prompted with were: “Describe an Experience with Injustice (Unfair Treatment) in the
Workplace”, “Insights about Your Own Less-Than- Ideal Performance,” “Describe a Leader that Inspired (or Inspires) You,” and “Describe Your Experience(s) with Organizational Change.” Sitting down to write
these papers was truly an experience. I found myself thinking about things that hadn’t crossed my mind in years.

As Module 2 comes to an end and winter break begins, first and foremost I am looking forward to spending quality time with my wonderful wife. I am also looking forward to reflecting on these first two modules and really  reexamining and interpreting the experiences that I have had in this program because so much has happened already. It is with reflection that we gain a new understanding and making time for this will be a priority for me going forward.

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Together Like Peas and Carrots: Managing Your Semester and Your CSA…

Are they simply veggies in your refrigerator? Think again as Madeline Brumberg ’18 reflects on the learning, networking, and self-management opportunities in her fall CSA.

By the end of the week, I am usually ready to catch up on missed sleep or take off to the woods with my dog. The sight of my fridge, however, chock full of vegetables waiting to be cooked, tells me I better stay inside and cook.

This was the weekly struggle this semester as I attempted to keep up with classwork, teamwork, and a community supported agriculture (CSA) share. My share, paid for at the beginning of the season to provide farmers a more stable income and seed start up costs, got delivered weekly to a campus drop off spot.  (For more information about CSAs please see this blog post from a local farm.) As the seasons changed, my share changed from bags of lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes, to bags of potatoes, squash, and kale.  The share which I chose was very abundant and I had to be very diligent in cooking to minimize my food waste.

A number of other students in the program also had CSAs and we swapped ideas for getting through seemingly endless amounts of carrots and cabbage.  We all depended heavily of veggie stir fries with a side of rice or quinoa, but this got dull after a couple of weeks and we had to branch out.  A favorite recipe to emerge out of desperation to use up cabbage and potatoes was a stir fry of those two with ground sausage from Vermont Salumi, whole-grain mustard, and pepitas. The excess CSA veggies brought some of the students together for homemade dinners.  We used the opportunity to collaborate on recipes, talk through assignments, study for exams, and unwind after a long week of classes.

Managing to use vegetables before they went bad and getting my homework done provided me with an excellent opportunity to practice time management.  I depended on my crockpot and roasting so that I could cook and do assignments at the same time.  Sometimes, though, I would take the evening off to go through my whole fridge and cook up anything and everything in there.  Those nights were an opportunity for me to reflect on what I was learning in this program.  With the break neck speed of this program, finding moments like these have been paramount.  Getting through CSA vegetables has been a good excuse to do just that.

So is it possible to get through your CSA and your semester?  Yes, it just takes a little planning and some teamwork.

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Getting to Know the Class of 2018: Kaitlin Sampson

Kaitlin Sampson ’18 came to The Sustainable Innovation MBA from the hospitality industry, most recently with Marriott International, where she was an Area Sales & Marketing Manager. She was interviewed by Isabel Russell, an undergraduate at UVM.  

Why did you choose to attend The Sustainable Innovation MBA program?

I wanted to pivot my career path toward work that was more meaningful.

What has been your favorite part/element of the program thus far?

The organizational behavior courses have been my favorite part of the program.  Our courses teach you how to go from a good leader to a great leader and how to use those skills to create a transformational culture within the workplace.

What are three things someone considering the program should be aware of?

The amazing network that the program provides, the diversity in classwork and the diversity of students.

How has the Sustainable Innovation MBA helped you?

It has helped me reflect on my passions and strengths, and given me the confidence in the business world for post SIMBA.

 

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Food for Thought: Questions From the National Net Impact Conference

This post was written by Arielle Tatar ‘18

As members of The Sustainable Innovation MBA’s local chapter, Sarah Healey ‘18 and I attended the national Net Impact conference in Atlanta, GA in late-October.

All the sessions and keynotes were, of course, very informative and interesting (I am happy to share my notes to anyone who is interested in the speakers and discussions. Email me your contact information).

However, I’d like to challenge you to think about different perspectives of sustainability. I attended multiple small group sessions revolving around the food and agriculture industries. The following questions were brought up by either the speakers or members of the audience.

Topic: Sustainable Agriculture in the 21st Century:

Panelists: Jerry Lynch, VP of Sustainability, General Mills; Keith Kenny, VP of Sustainability, McDonald’s; Shari Rogge-Fidler, CEO, Applied Geosolutions; Will Harris, 6th generation Georgia farmer

  1. There​ ​are​ ​struggles​ ​with​ ​commodities​ ​that​ ​are​ ​geographically​ ​specific​. How​ ​do​ ​we​ ​support those​ ​farmers​ ​and​ ​support​ ​resilience?
  2. What are the challenges as we look to the future?
  3. What are the barriers to catalyzing change and how do we overcome them?
  4. How do you quantify environmental risk?
  5. How can we think differently to achieve our agriculture objectives?
  6. What is our mutual responsibility to both people and the world?
  7. How do we keep using food to bond people together?
  8. How do we make industrial farms more sustainable?
  9. What excites you about the future of sustainable agriculture?
  10. How do you help other farms by being a role model?

Continue reading “Food for Thought: Questions From the National Net Impact Conference”

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Tech Start-Up Helps Farmers Grow More, Waste Less

This article was written by Margaret Arzon ’17 and originally appeared at PYXERAGlobal.org. Margaret is currently a Business Strategy Consultant.

Accessing Information through Mobile Technology Gives Smallholder Farmers Much-Needed Support

Walking through the streets of India, it’s hard not to notice the plethora of fresh fruits and vegetables that line the sidewalks, pretty much everywhere you go. Just a short 30-minute drive out of the city center lands you in acres of cultivated fields where many of these crops originate.

Roughly 50 percent of India’s workforce is devoted to agriculture. This demographic is common in many other emerging and frontier countries where a dominant proportion of the population relies on farming for its livelihood. Smallholder farmer is a title given to people who own less than five acres of arable land. The vast majority of smallholder farmers live in a cyclical pattern of poverty as they struggle to access markets and sell their products at the best price. Lack of market access means that farmers often lose money, even in a high growth season, and a perfectly good harvest goes to waste. With such a fragmented system in rural areas, it is extremely challenging for farmers to generate a profit to support themselves and their families.

Lack of market access means that farmers often lose money, even in a high growth season, and a perfectly good harvest goes to waste. With such a fragmented system in rural areas, it is extremely challenging for farmers to generate a profit to support themselves and their families.

Smallholder farmers are not insignificant. Collectively, they represent 500 million farms around the world and employ approximately 2 billion people. They are responsible for about 80 percent of the food consumed in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. As the global population size charges toward an estimated 9 billion by 2050, the demand on smallholder farmers to increase crop yield will only continue to rise, along with the critical need to mitigate post-harvest losses. Analysts predict that food access will need to increase by 70 percent to feed 2 billion additional people on the planet, and production in developing countries would need to almost double. Food security is a global issue, and one that requires partnerships across all sectors to solve.

Continue reading “Tech Start-Up Helps Farmers Grow More, Waste Less”

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Knowing Your Impact: Food Waste

This post was written by Sarah Healey ’18

The Net Impact Graduate Chapter at the University of Vermont is designed to supplement learning experiences for students in the Sustainable Innovation MBA program. For our first event of the year a number of chapter members took a field trip to the Green Mountain Compost Facility in Williston, Vt..

At the facility we got a lesson and a tour from Robin Orr, the Events and Hospitality Outreach Coordinator for the Chittenden Solid Waste District (CSWD).

How much are we throwing away?
Every year Vermonters send 4,000 truckloads of trash to the only landfill in the state. Approximately half of this trash is actually trash. The other half consists of items that could have been diverted either to a recycling facility or a compost facility.

Continue reading “Knowing Your Impact: Food Waste”

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Innovator in Residence: Marilia Bezerra Offers Nine Lessons and One Question

This post was written by Sarah Healey ’18.

Marilia Bezerra spoke recently to The Sustainable Innovation MBA cohort as the third Innovator in Residence for the year. She is the Managing Partner at CARE Enterprises, CARE’s social enterprise venture that links producers in the world’s poorest communities with the formal markets necessary for those producers to sell their products and services. It focuses on business ventures with the potential for exponential growth and to become game-changers in the fight against poverty.

Marilia’s life has led her on a career path full of sharp turns and road blocks that created her story.

In telling her story she offered nine lessons and pieces of advice to
aspiring entrepreneurs:

Nine Lessions…

  1. Figure out how to become the connective tissue for the problems we need to solve. A fundamental ingredient for all of us stepping into the world is to figure out how to connect people to each other to solve problems.
  2. Telling your story can be limiting.
  3. Be keenly aware of your privilege –- Bezerra talked about how she won the privilege lottery. She grew up during a relatively stable time in Brazil and was raised in a middle-class family that afforded her opportunities in life, but gave her a sense of value of the most basic things.
  4. If you are going to say something, know what it means. When using metrics, many of the numbers mean nothing. For example, the calculation of how many lives a program touched. What Bezerra learned was to ask yourself what it means three time when stating metrics and figures. If at any point you cannot answer, then the metric likely does not have meaning.
  5. Sometimes you will need to take sharp turns to figure out what you are doing, and you need to just go for it! Life takes weird turns, close your eyes and say, ‘Mom & Dad, I got this.’
  6. Fundraising is like running a marathon — it is going to be uncomfortable, but you just keep running through it until it gets better.
  7. How you feel now is not going to last — Bezerra talked about the importance of needing to detach yourself from your story for a point in time. This powerful mechanism allows you to step outside and detach from life to get past the disruption.
  8. Take time off & really take it! –- it is tempting to think about what is next, but Bezerra talked about the importance of taking a real break when you are burnt out.
  9. After doing cool things, the expectation of what is next can be limiting. When you are taking a break and looking for the next steps, people will ask what is next, but do not let that limit your story.

…And One Question

Bezerra finished with a question for aspiring entrepreneurs: How are you going to get really good at working at the edge of chaos?

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The Cape Wind Project: The Importance of Strategic Messaging

A student team in The Sustainable Innovation MBA Class of 2018 conducted this speculative case analysis in their “Sustainable Brand Marketing” course for the ill-fated Cape Wind offshore wind farm in Cape Cod, Mass. The team consisted of Julia Barnes, Taylor Mikell, Julia Lyon, and Randy Baron. This article was primarily written and adapted for the Review by Ms. Barnes.

The case study is a lesson in what can happen when one loses control of the narrative surrounding a controversial project and fails to invest strategically in stewarding innovation through the gauntlet of implementation. This is what can happen when strategic messaging is undervalued – the first offshore wind farm in America stalled in 2015 and is considered dead.

Jim Gordon, a Boston entrepreneur who made his fortune in energy, conceived of the Cape Wind offshore wind farm as the next step in his mission to provide efficient and environmentally sound energy. After all, wind power had already proved successful in Europe and the technology was becoming more sophisticated every year. The cost of successful wind power generation in countries like Denmark and Germany was even as low as $.04 per KW hour. Gordon had also identified an attractive location – Horseshoe Shoal, off the coast of Hyannis Port, Mass. where a 130-turbine farm could theoretically make an extremely significant dent in the use of fossil fuel for residents of Cape Cod. With depth and wave conditions that made construction of these huge turbines feasible, Gordon was looking at an investment of over a billion dollars to see his dream of offshore wind energy come to life.

However, he faced a number of issues in executing the Cape Wind vision. First, Gordon immediately ran into extreme and well-funded opposition from rich property owners along the coast who did not want to see their ocean view marred by wind turbines. People from the Koch Brothers to Bunny Mellon to Walter Cronkite joined forces behind the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound (APNS): a NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) group flush with cash and influence who set out to discredit Gordon and undercut the validity of the Cape Wind project. Second, Cape Wind faced prominent political opposition. The influence and connections of the APNS board members wreaked havoc for Cape Wind’s political standing and extensive lobbying efforts damaged the progress of what would have otherwise been a highly embraced endeavor. Finally, Cape Wind was an expensive undertaking – one whose fluctuations in cost had significant impact on its timeline.

Problem Analysis: Well-funded NIMBYism – The coast of Massachusetts along Nantucket Sound is home to many extremely wealthy and influential residents. Exhibit 8 shows the span of wealth that runs from Oyster Harbor to the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis. These multi million-dollar views would be impacted by the construction of Cape Wind. The obstruction was enough to have them form APNS and arm it with millions of dollars in funds, high-powered lobbying efforts, and a massive public relations campaign to discredit and destroy Cape Wind. As APNS alleged, Cape Wind would negatively impact commercial and recreational boating, impair fishing, harm tourism, kill bird populations and upset the Cape’s tax base with property value decline. While citing factually based evidence to the contrary, Gordon also answered these claims with impact studies and the support of Clean Power Now, a pro-wind, grassroots community group with pennies compared to APNS. APNS was skilled in enlisting Chambers of Commerce, town government, fishermen, lobstermen and boaters to their cause – a middle-class demographic that had little in common with the rich individuals behind the AstroTurf movement.

Continue reading “The Cape Wind Project: The Importance of Strategic Messaging”