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News & Events
WDI's London Wins Prestigious Competition
Thursday, April 17, 2008
WDI's London Wins Prestigious Competition
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Ted London, director of WDI’s Base of the Pyramid research initiative, and U-M graduate student Molly Christiansen have won top honors in a prestigious international case writing competition.
London and Christiansen, who will receive master’s degrees in business and public health later this month, took first place in the 2008 oikos Sustainability Case Writing Competition. Their case, “Scojo Foundation: A vision for growth at the Base of the Pyramid,” beat out a field of 26 competitors from Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. Part of their case included video shot in India by Greg Barker of Michigan’s Ross School of Business’ Computing Services.
The competition is part of the oikos Foundation at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. The competition looks tries to encourage the writing of excellent sustainability teaching for cases that can be used for teaching at business schools worldwide. London also won the competition in 2005.
The Scojo Foundation is a social enterprise that trains entrepreneurs in developing countries to give basic eye exams and sell low-cost reading glasses in their communities. Scojo India, headquartered in Hyderabad, is Scojo Foundation’s largest and fastest-growing operation.
Click here to view Ted London's interview with Scojo Foundation Founder Jordan Kassalow and to listen to a podcast of Kassalow's WDI Global Impact Speaker Series talk.
In India, it is estimated that 80% of the population, or approximately 880 million people, live on less than $2 per day. Scojo India primarily targets this segment, of which approximately 92.4 million suffer from presbyopia. Many people in this demographic do not know that there is a simple and affordable solution to presbyopia, and therefore do not look for opportunities to buy reading glasses.
The case exposes several challenges that are common to many non-profit and for-profit ventures serving the BoP, including scaling, financial sustainability, organizational structure, and assessing and enhancing poverty alleviation impacts.
The case is considered particularly timely and instructive given the increasing interest of business, from microenterprises to multinationals and large non-profit organizations, in base of the economic pyramid markets — the more than 4 billion people around the world who currently are not part of the global economy. Effectively serving this huge market has tremendous implications for corporate growth, nonprofit strategy, poverty alleviation and global sustainability.
"I am thrilled," Christiansen said. "Researching and writing this case was a wonderful learning experience for me. Scojo Foundation is a terrific organization and I thoroughly enjoyed the process of developing the case in collaboration with the Ted London and the Scojo Foundation team."
Taking third place in the competition was a case by Andrew Hoffman, the Holcim Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the Ross School of Business, and Rebecca Henn, a graduate student. The pair was aided by WDI Research Associates Grace Augustine and Dave Vannette, who worked with Hoffman and Penn to fill in gaps in the case.
Augustine and Vannette provided new ideas for sections of the case, and then wrote them. They also edited the language and style to be consistent with the case writing conventions and helped find new sources of information for the case. Between the two of them, they also worked as copy editors locating and fixing typos and grammatical errors.
The case discussed LivingHomes and the company’s quest to build a business strategy to capitalize on the new market segment in green construction.
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