BUS 374 Week 7 Reflection

This week we covered the Business Model Canvas and Lean Start Up. The Business Model breaks the business down into parts and asks specific questions about each of the 9 parts to see if it makes sense and is what the consumer needs. The Lean Start Up is an approach that gets products to market faster by starting with the most basic idea first then after feedback it keeps moving forward, stops, or pivots and makes changes. 

 This week we also posted our Innovation Presentations. I really enjoyed watching some of those. I learned about new companies like ArtLifting that is helping artists that are disabled or homeless. It was great to see just how many companies can be considered to be in the realm of social innovation. 

• How can sharpening your business skills help you help others? What skills are most important?

I think business skills can be good life skills as well. In this class we have talked extensivly about creativity and out of the box thinking. This can help me to help others because it will allow me to look at problems from a different perspective. One business skill that I think is really important is the power of networking. Establishing and growing relationships with people helps in business, but it also helps in life. It also allows you to help those around you because you know more people that have talents and abilities that can help in a myriad of ways.

BUS 374 Week 6 Reflection

    This week, the focus was on revenue generation. While I know that revenue is what makes businesses work, I never spent much time thinking about where the money originally comes from. I think about the show "Shark Tank" and think that all companies must have investors and then they just go from there and either make money or don't. So this week was very informative in all the internal and external ways companies can generate revenue.

    The activity this week was very interesting to me. I have been using Parents Helping Parents as my example for a non-profit organization. It was interesting to take an actual company and find they ways they generate revenue. I was surprised to see that it was multiple avenues and not just one. I learned a good deal from this activity. 

Does money buy happiness? Can money change the world? 

    I don't think that money buys happiness, but I do think it makes it a lot easier to get there. Happiness is a state of mind and that means a person is able to be happy in whatever circumstance they might find themselves. However, that might take more effort for some because of the situation they are in. If someone doesn't have a safe place to live, adequate nutrition, or access to clean drinking water, it is going to be much harder to find happiness. This is where the next part comes in. Money can change the world. Even if that just means changing it for a small group of people. If there is a community that cannot afford the basic things like water and medicine then they are not able to do much to improve their situation. However, with the means to make money, like a goat that provides milk to sell, they can begin to change their world.

    This also makes me think if the saying, "It's really expensive to be poor." This is as simple as a pair of shoes. Someone with little income might only be able to spend $20 on a meager pair of shoes and someone better off financially spends $60.  The $20 shoes are not high quality and have to be replaced often causing that person to spend $80 over time replacing the shoes 4 times in the same amount of time that the $60 pair lasts. This is just a small example. Those with lower incomes generally have lower credit scores and are required to put deposits down for gas and electric bills or higher deposits for rent. This is money that they struggle to have and someone in a different financial position can afford it, but isn't required to do so.

BUS 374 Week 5 Reflection

     This week the focus was on impact and metrics to gauge that impact. We looked at what an organization does on a daily basis and how that creates a chain reaction causing the long term outcomes that the organization is working toward. We also focused on mission statements and how to create one that directly reflects the organization. This entails a verb, a target, and an outcome. This relates back to the idea that the actions of the organization (the verb) will effect a certain group (target) in a specific way over time (the outcome).

    The video that I like best was Measuring your Social Impact. This discussed the theory of change. It also referred to the theory of change as an impact chain. I really liked that mental image. It goes from the organization to the activity to the output to the outcome. It was a ripple effect. I am looking to go into elementary education after receiving my degree. Part of this involves studying lesson plans and how to create them. The impact chain reminds me a little of this. For lesson plans, you plan backward. You start with what you want the outcome to be and then design specific activities that will yield those results. I imagine that working backward is a way to help organizations ensure that they are meeting the outcomes that they are working toward.

    We also read the article "Starfish Hurling and Community Service." This article broke down some reasons that it is important to really pay attention to what the social impact is of our actions. We might be doing an action, like hurling starfish back into the sea, and all the while we are thinking that we are doing a great act of service. However, this is just what it looks like on the surface. In fact hurling the starfish might actually make things worse. What if those starfish were an important part of the ecosystem and now birds were going hungry or the starfish needed to be removed from the seafloor in order for that ecosystem to thrive. Hurling the starfish back in those cases make it problematic. Thus, before starting an action for the sake of social impact, one should take the time and effort needed to gauge what impact (if any) is being made. This article made me think about something I heard a while back called "voluntourism." This is where tourists engage in volunteer efforts to help the communities they have traveled to see. While this is not inherently a negative, there are some situations where the volunteering has actually been a negative affect on the communities in which they are there to help. This is because the social impact has not been taken into consideration. Instead they just started hurling starfish.

BUS 374 Week 4 Reflection

 This week focused on Design Thinking. This is the process of how to solve problems that puts humans at the center. The process starts by thinking about what the individual needs of people are. How do we find solutions that are going to actually help if we can't empathize with those experiencing the problem. So design thinking starts with the empathizing. Seeing what the human need is, leads to the next step of thinking of creative solutions. The more ideas, the better and the more creative, the better. Then the important step of the prototype comes in. You take an idea and try it out. This is a process though and not a final step because with the prototype you learn and change and learn and change. Then comes implementation. Because the problem started with human centered empathetic thought, the plan implemented can lead to changes that will meet the needs of the individuals facing the problem.

The TED talk by David Kelley really stood out to me this week. It was about creative confidence. He gave an example of a kid that was making something in school and someone didn't respond well to it and the kids never made a project like it again. This reminded me of an experiment done in an elementary school. Each grade level was asked the same questions and the number of hands raised was recorded. The questions were all about skill levels and were similar to Raise you hand if you are good at singing. Raise your hand if you are good at dancing. Raise you hand if you are able to draw well. Starting in kindergarten, nearly every student put their hands up for every question. Each grade level up, less and less hands would go up until in 5th grade, only 3-4 students would raise their hand for each question. It goes to show that as we go along in life, we loose confidence in things that we think we are not perfect in or we loose confidence to try because of the fear of rejection. I think David Kelley's TED talk on how to regain this confidence was wonderful and being willing to understand that mistake making is part of the process will help increase our ability to do just that.

Design Thinking is very important in social innovation because of the human aspect of design thinking. If the objective of social innovation is to creatively solve problems that face societies, then understanding the needs of the individuals in the societies ensures that the solutions will be real solutions and not just temporary fixes. Design thinking encourages creativity and trying, failing, learning, and trying again. This process will lead to the solutions that will be most helpful to those in need of the solution.

BUS 374 Week 3 Reflection

Social innovation comes as a result of wanting to fix problems that society faces. This week, we focused on how to identify those big problems. Once the problem was identified, it is important to get down to the root cause. There are several different ways to identify the root cause including cause and effect analysis, the 5 whys and the fishbone tool. The purpose of each method is to take the problem and break it down into smaller and smaller bits. These bits are how we identify the root cause and what we can build social innovation around.

The 5 why's really stood out to me. It takes the big problem and asks why. That breaks it down to a smaller problem. Each subsequent why takes the problem smaller and smaller until there is something small enough that a counter measure can be put in place to prevent each issue from compounding into the big issue. I think the 5 why's stands out to me so much because it has practical use outside of social innovation. I can use it as a quick mental exercise anytime I run into a speed bump in any task I'm doing. 

The social issue I selected has to do with students being able to access special education support without families having to put up a fight with their school district or learn case law in order to hold a district accountable. Because I have 2 children with learning differences, I have had to enlist the help of our school district in getting my children the support that they need in order to learn. This was incredibly difficult for me to navigate and I ended up having to spend thousands of dollars on doctor's evaluations and educational advocates to guide me through the bureaucratic red tape needed to have my children's needs taken seriously. While going through this process, I learned that it wasn't just a problem for me or even just for parents in my district. This is a nationwide problem. I am most looking forward to finding a way to help families like mine not have to sacrifice money or critical educational time in order for their children to receive an education.