Competition Promotes Social Entrepreneurship

BYU’s Social Venture Competition (SVC) is designed to have students apply their entrepreneurial skills to solve social problems. The winner of this year’s $10,000 grand prize is helping people around the world get back on their feet—in more ways than one.

The first-place winner, 2ft. Prosthetics, began designing its below-the-knee prosthetic leg in 2008 when the BYU Biomedical Engineering Club sponsored a design competition within the Fulton College of Engineering and Technology. Since then, the team wanted to share the affordable prosthetic design with those in developing countries but didn’t know how.

“When we heard about a competition that focused on humanitarian work, we decided to compete,” says David Williams, a senior studying mechanical engineering from Bountiful, Utah.  “Our venture will help amputees be able to walk and provide for their families again, and the locals working in the clinics will receive a valuable technical skill.”

The SVC is an annual, campus-wide competition. Students submit business plans that meet a social need in areas such as: health care, poverty, education, energy, agriculture, and the environment. Students work with faculty, practitioners, and professionals as they develop and implement venture plans.

“Many students want to make the world a better place, and our goal is to be a resource to help them accomplish that,” says Aaron Miller, Social Venture Competition faculty director. “We want to educate students and others on social entrepreneurship—what it is and how it works.”

At this year’s competition a wide variety of social issues were explored. EcoScraps, the second-place winner of $4,000, developed a venture that collects food waste from grocery stores and restaurants, recycling it into 100 percent organic, highly nutritious soil that reduces landfill waste by 22 percent.

The third-place winner and recipient of $1,000, International Children’s Legal Aid, provides protection to AIDS orphans through preemptive succession planning in Uganda. This service alleviates the threat of property grabbing—where extended family members take assets from immediate family that have lost a father to AIDS.

“SVC gave us deadlines that helped us clarify our mission and goals and helped us decide how we were going to accomplish them,” says Tyler Lake, a recent JD/MPA graduate from West Linn, Oregon, and member of the International Children’s Legal Aid team. “We are already planning to send our first group of law students to Uganda to provide succession planning.”

After the final round of competition ended, the teams met with representatives from the Ballard Center to set short- and long-term goals for their ventures. Each team has the potential to win more money from the center by accomplishing the goals they established at their meeting.

For more information about the Social Venture Competition and how to compete, visit socialventure.byu.edu.