Thanks Arianna! Your support is appreciated!

Almost two years of relentless work finally pay off. President Bill Clinton came and spoke at the Global Case Challenge final. My dad was in attendance and got a chance to spend some time chatting with the 42nd US President.

Dad, I know you are proud of me. Know that I could not have gotten this far without your support.

What an amazing experience. Thank you to those of you that made this publication possible. Our hope is that through our work we will raise awareness and contribute towards finding a solution to the global clean water crisis.

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Another notch on the list of accomplishments for the Global Case Challenge.  The New York Times recently published a full page article referencing how a single event sparked the creation of a degree program based on Social Entrepreneurship.

By D.D. GUTTENPLAN
Published: January 23, 2011

Business Schools With a Social Appeal

Starting in September, the Hult International Business School will offer a master’s degree in social entrepreneurship. The Hult president, Stephen Hodges, said that the new program, which is “based on the principle that social problems can be tackled in similar ways to business problems,” grew out of the enormous response to the Hult Global Case Challenge, a competition that tackles social problems “through crowd-sourcing innovative ideas and solutions from the world’s best and brightest business school students.”

“One of our students, Ahmad Ashkar, organized the first competition last year,” Dr. Hodges said in an interview. “This was an entirely student-led activity. The school provided no support whatsoever. In the end there were teams from 100 different business schools who donated their time and expertise to helping One Laptop per Child — the charity that brings inexpensive computers to the third world. It made us realize that there is a tremendous appetite for this. Today’s business students are far more socially aware than their predecessors.”

Acknowledging that “a competition to address the problems of British Airways,” for example, wouldn’t generate the same level of student interest, the school decided to back the student challenge by donating $1 million to implement this year’s winning idea. At the same time, Hult found that “an increasing portion of our applicants weren’t interested in consulting or investment banking,” Dr. Hodges said. “They were aiming at careers in non-governmental organizations or hoped to start social enterprises.”

Though the one-year social entrepreneurship masters will only be offered in London this year, the school plans to roll out the program at all of its locations, beginning next year in San Francisco. Hult, which was founded by Arthur D. Little, a consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1964, then taken over by the Swedish entrepreneur Bertil Hult, now has campuses in Dubai and Shanghai in addition to London, Boston and San Francisco.

Hult is hardly the first business school to try to leverage idealism. Tony Sheldon, who runs the Program on Social Enterprise at Yale’s School of Management, or S.O.M., points out that when it was founded in 1976, “S.O.M.” originally stood for School of Organization and Management. The school has long been a magnet for students seeking careers in the nonprofit sector.

“We didn’t even call our degrees M.B.A.’s,” he said. “A lot of companies now, and a lot of business schools, have adopted the vocabulary of social enterprise. The dangers are that it becomes just a marketing ploy, rather than an expression of purpose.”

Mr. Sheldon welcomed the Hult program. “Even if most of their graduates don’t start new social enterprises, there are also ways to effect change, even inside multinational corporations, by influencing things like the supply chain or purchasing decisions on issues like child labor or the company’s human resource policy or the effects on the environment of the production process.”

An expert in microfinance who has consulted for the World Bank, the New York City Financial Services Corporation and the Ford Foundation, Mr. Sheldon said that genuine social enterprise needed to “enhance the productive capacity” of its clients. “There’s a lot of hype about targeting ‘the bottom of the pyramid,”’ he said. “But we need to ask where the profits flow as well as who the customers are.”

“Social entrepreneurship is a little like pornography,” Mr. Sheldon said. “It’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it.”

Besides Yale’s School of Management, which now does award its graduates an M.B.A., there are social entrepreneurship programs at a number of American universities. Duke’s Fuqua business school has the well-known Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, while the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley and Columbia University’s business school have long collaborated on the Global Social Venture Competition with the London Business School, France’s ESSEC, and partners in India, Thailand and Korea.

Exciting news interview out of Spain! Expect to see something similar for another 25-30 countries! Our initiative is beginning to take form!

http://gestionaradio.com/getplayer.php?aud=10203

As the Global Case Challenge continues its quest to become THE global platform for tackling global socio-economic problems, it is with pleasure that I welcome water.org on as the selected partner for the 2011 campaign.

As a Palestinian, the issue of clean water is something that hits very close to home. Many people overlook the value of such a simple thing, but if a change is not made to the global approach of clean water, the lack of such a critical resource could lead to global conflict.

At the event, student teams of five from 4 continents and in 5 cities will develop innovative solutions around how to make clean water sustainable and available to all of humanity. Currently, one out of every six people globally lack this vital resource. It is reported, that every 20 seconds a child dies from lack of sanitary and drinking water.

Our hopes for this year’s event is that we not only come up with the best ideas and solutions to tackle this epidemic, but also raise awareness around this critically important topic.

Wow!

What a ride that last one year has been! I finished up my MBA a little over a month ago, and things have been moving at light speed ever since.

In 6 weeks, we were able to take an idea from last year and turn it into a world-wide, international headline that will have lasting effects on the global population.

Exactly, AMAZING!

The 2011 Hult Global Case Challenge (yes, Hult as in Hult International Business School) is on track to become the most recognize event on not only the global MBA circuit, but amongst the general population of philanthropists internationally.  In the mix for this year is: $1M Prize, a fully expensed, paid trip for the top team of 5 from each Regional (Dubai, London, Boston, SanFrancisco and Shanghai) to NYC, President Bill Clinton and a host of guest celebrity judges, philanthropists and at least ONE billionaire, most probably more.

If you are a close follower of mine (the two or three of you) you will remember that the 2010 Global Case Challenge (inaugural year) partnered up with One Laptop per Child and brought students together from around the world to help solve OLPC’s challenge of scaling up the delivery of their $100 laptops to a point where they would tip the market, and effectively put their mission and company out of business – which would define success for them.

Last year’s Global Winner from Carnegie Mellon had an amazing solution based on a simple, yet scalable “OLPC Store” (app store like) where a platform of commerce could be built off of the OLPC machine known as the “Xo”

So, in this year’s event, rather than tell our partner charity and the winning team bye-bye and thank you upon conclusion, the Hult Global Case Challenge will infuse $1M into the winning cause for the purpose of implementing the winning team’s idea.  $1M = One-Million Dollars for those of you that are wondering if you just read that write.  Yes, its $1,000,000 to implement the winning student team’s idea.

Most college students wouldn’t’ know what to do with $100 nonetheless, $1M.  And to those students…you better find the 4 smartest people that go to school with you register (www.globalcasechallene.com) for the event.  Good news is that you may also enroll one almunus onto your team (maybe your old roommate works for McKinsey?)

The real key to the HGCC is ACTION.  Hult is a business school that really stresses action learning and this event is an appropriate reflection of what the school is all about; international diversity, CSR and action-based curriculum. The $1M prize allows students to really think long and hard about a solution that not only looks good on paper and powerpoint, but also carries the economics with it to make it sustainable.

So, where are we now?

We announced the event live at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting.  For those of you not familiar with CGI, visit their website at: www.clintonglobalinitiative.org.

Our role in this is to be the “enabler”.  CGI works with around 2000 commitments world-wide .  These range from climate and poverty to education reform and women trafficking.  Every global social problem is covered in some way shape or form.

Our goal is to select a cause that will a) get students excited, b) help us by creating buzz around the event, and c) truly benefit from the $1M and the 5,000 or so hours of consulting and hundreds of new ideas and solutions.

Student teams can apply to compete in any one of the 5 cities that the event is happening in.  Our objective is to have created the most diverse set of teams and participants that come from each corner of the world.

Crowdsourcing innovative ideas and solutions from these brilliant minds to solve global challenges is our M.O. If you are interested in your chance at changing the world, then please join us!

We are taking applications now. Please visit: www.globalcasechallenge.com to apply and for more details.

In the last few weeks, we have seen the US Federal Government condemn and go after two staples of our modern internet age. Both are “Wikis”, self generating, user fed websites that make use of crowdsourcing to fulfill their missions, and as a result, ALL of our lives are better as we are given free access to the world’s public and sometimes “classified” data.

What can and can’t governments around the world keep secret? Should democracies keep secrets from its people? Furthermore, should monarchy’s continue ruling their nations with limited information sharing and one-sided decision making?

Thanks to the growing use of the “www” the question of should is moving to can, and that answer is NO! As technology becomes more and more accessible to the masses, almost nothing in terms of information is out of reach.

Governments can’t continue “classifying” data, the private industry can not lie to profit and the public sector will be held accountable, globally.

Recently, I was in Amman, Jordan and while there I needed some emergency dental work. I was referred to one of the “best” dental offices in town, and within about 5 minutes of entering, immediately began being fed lies. How did I know I was being lied to? iPhone / Google.

Lie # 1: Dentist boasts about being American Board Certified. Confirmed as false.

Lie #2: Dentist tries to sell me 2x dental crown, calling it higher quality. Confirmed as lie.

Lie #3: Time needed to complete lab work. Based on the product I selected, the Dentist insisted that it required more “attention” than other, more expensive alternatives. All lies, as he was simply trying to upsell.

Lie #4: Prescription…For God’s Sake, I couldn’t believe the last one. I was in pain and asked for a narcotics script to relieve the pain. Dentist wrote me a script for what google told me was anxiety….

Point here is that no-longer can we be taken lightly. The internet revolution will soon reach less developed worlds as they shift towards peer review and concern. In countries like Jordan the majority of the population still does not blog and review, however this culture will soon change and the likes of the shady Dr’s will be put into their place.

What does the future hold for the average consumer / citizen? We have never lived in an age where people are honest and straightforward because they have to be.

Got to run, will finish up my thoughts soon!

INNOVATION MODEL PIONEERED BY GLOBAL CASE CHALLENGE AND ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD SETS NEW STANDARD FOR SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Microsoft executive calls GCC “best he has ever seen”

BOSTON, MA, MAY 19, 2010 – One Laptop per Child (OLPC) in partnership with Hult International Business School (Hult) and the Center for Innovation, Excellence and Leadership (IXL Center) is pleased to announce North American regional top performer Carnegie Mellon University as the world champion of the 1st Annual Global Case Challenge “GCC”.

Four Tepper MBAs and a PhD student took the top honors, beating out regional champions from Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Hult hosted social entrepreneurs from 31 of the world’s top MBA programs across four global locations, who came together to provide innovative solutions to this year’s partner company, OLPC. Participants included teams from Harvard, London Business School, INSEAD and other leading business schools.

“We have pioneered a new innovation model that integrates crowd-sourcing and competitive environments and we did it on a global scale” – Ahmad A. Ashkar, Founder of the Global Case Challenge and President of the Hult International Business School Consulting Club. “The model is sustainable because it leverages the hearts and minds of the world’s best and brightest business students and provides a platform for them to give back to society.”

Over 60 detailed solutions were provided to OLPC along with 2000 plus hours of consulting advisory. “The IXL Center worked intimately with our organization to develop a real-time case study and challenge question that was of strategic importance to OLPC, which translated into student solutions that were realistic and actionable” – Paul Commons, Director, One Laptop per Child.

The GCC innovation model has set a new standard for social entrepreneurship and continues to expand on its mission of crowd-sourcing innovative strategies from the world’s best and brightest young business minds that attempt to solve the social and economic problems that plague the world. “Developing a social conscience can be critical to becoming a successful business leader,” said Hult President Dr. Stephen Hodges. “By challenging students to provide concrete solutions to ongoing social issues, they can get a head start in that crucial process.”

Planning for the 2011 GCC is underway and there is still time to get involved by registering on-line. Companies can participate as both sponsors and/or partners. The 2010 GCC featured some of the world’s biggest names and largest companies such as Dubai International Academic City (DIAC), General Mills, Dubai World, DHL and Microsoft where Steve Resnick, Chief Technology Officer, Technology Centers USA said, “Microsoft is proud to collaborate with the Hult International Business School and others in hosting competitive events like this that drive business students to be responsible strategists for the global greater good.”

For more information about the Global Case Challenge, please visit www.globalcasechallenge.com