Hope op-ed & Ventures in Development (ViD)

In case you missed it, Paul Collier who wrote “The Bottom Billion” had an op-ed in today’s NY Times. I like how he raises hope as a differentiator. Would it make sense to add hope as a development measure, at both the individual and community levels?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/opinion/22collier.html

 

Also, I promised Professor Bugg-Levine that I would post the organization I interned with this summer in China. The “mother” company is a nonprofit social enterprise incubator called Ventures in Development (ViD, www.venturesindev.org). It is currently incubating two for-profit enterprises:

·         Shokay (yak fiber/down that feels like cashmere), www.shokay.com

·         Mei Xiang Cheese (yak cheese), www.meixiangcheese.com

 

Part of my internship was to help ViD think about the financial and development metrics they should use to measure their overarching goal of alleviating poverty.  One question we faced was whether incubating a scalable company like Shokay is a “better” investment than incubating a company like Mei Xiang Cheese, which is a modular business. As long as Shokay’s products are in demand, we can continue sourcing more fiber from yak herders and creating more work for our knitting cooperatives. On the other hand, Mei Xiang impacts individuals in one village deeply (the one trained on western cheese-making techniques and now running its own cheese farm), but would require great investment to create similar benefits in other communities.

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Beverly Chung | MBA 2009 | Columbia Business School | bchung09@gsb.columbia.edu | 650-776-5001